First year building

[JLH]

So I finally made the plunge into plug building over the winter. I have been wanting to try it out for quite a while but living in a condo for a number of years I never had the room to setup a little workshop until we recently bought a house. My goal was to keep it simple and focus on one plug that I would actually use. Needles were kind of an obvious choice because I like to fish them, I think they are effective on bigger fish, and probably most importantly I don’t have a band saw yet. I got setup after the holidays and spend most of January just playing around with the lathe trying to learn how to turn wood. One of the guys in my club was kind enough to show me the basics which was a huge help.

Going into building I knew that I wanted a pretty large needle, something like a Wadd but that sank horizontally and suspended on the retrieve. I ended up making 8 test bodies out of two different woods and placed weights in various places to try to get it to sink the way I wanted. This took a lot of time but it was fun experimenting and trying to create something that would do what I wanted it to do. I did finally get a needle that sank and swam the way I was looking for so I then tried to make 15 identical copies of that needle to fish this season. I don’t have a duplicator on the lathe so everything was free hand and there is some variability to the bodies but I tried to keep them as close to the original as possible. After sealing, weighting, painting (rattle cans) and clear coat they range in weight from 2.3 to 2.6 ounces without hooks. I did my testing with 4/0 6x hooks front and back which is what I plan to fish them with.

This forum was really a great resource for someone just starting out. Thanks for sharing so much information so freely.

Here is a picture of the finished product. Not anywhere’s near as pretty as what most of you guys produce but I am hopeful that they will catch me a couple of fish this season.