some heavy swimmers

[Diggin Jiggin]

Last fall I brought some of my dads old plugs home. We fish a lot of fast water, so it was interesting to see how they modified their swimmers to slow em down in the fast current.

Since I'm down the canal all the time I figured the same idea would work down there.

Here's some of my dads old ones. I've been playing with the one on the bottom. I stripped it down, took it apart and rebuilt it. Since he seemed to have painted everything white, thats how he's getting it back...

[Diggin Jiggin]

And some new ones to keep it company.

Mine are pretty close to the original but the heads are not as round and most of mine are a tiny bit thicker. These are right around 4 oz- which is what I was shooting for as I wanted distance and something heavy enough to throw with my canal gear..

My dads weighted the way it was with the lead solder was 3 3/4 oz.

[hunan]

4 basic food groups: white/black/yellow/wonderbread

[Karl F]

Very Nice Repaint, and Great New ones!

Amazing how many old plugs I've seen with the lead core wrap.. and how and where it was applied.. innovate as needed.. also seen what must have been old "favorites" that had split, but lovingly wired up, to keep 'em together... Great Learning oppurtunity, examining old plugs ya come across.

[numbskull]

Your father's plug looks to be an old wooden atom. Most were unweighted, but Bob Pond did make a version with a long slug of lead along the tail wire (I think it was 2 3/4 x 1/4 but if you want to know for sure pm me and I'll dig out the xray next week) and sometimes a straighter taper to the tail. It looks like your father was reduplicating that idea.

[Diggin Jiggin]

Originally Posted by numbskull

Your father's plug looks to be an old wooden atom. Most were unweighted, but Bob Pond did make a version with a long slug of lead along the tail wire (I think it was 2 3/4 x 1/4 but if you want to know for sure pm me and I'll dig out the xray next week) and sometimes a straighter taper to the tail. It looks like your father was reduplicating that idea.

Thanks for the offer George. Yes my dad's plug is an old atom, and it is actually one of the ones with the tail weight. I'm not very knowledgable about the old stuff, I thinks it's a 40 but I'm not sure if that's what the ones with the tail weights were called. Even with the tail weight they wanted them heavier. I tried to duplicate what they wanted in a plug, but I didn't want to call mine 40's as they are not true to the original in a lot of ways.

When I went to make mine I was unable to get the old tailweight out. So while the hooks and solder were on it, I balanced the plug on the edge of a hacksaw blade to see where its balance point was, and marked where that point was. With the hooks and solder the balance point was about 1/4-3/8" above the tail grommet.

Then when I made mine, I tried to get them to balance at the same point. To do that I ended up needing 2" of lead, but I pour my own and they are bigger diameter than what was in there. Because my lead is bigger around I made the tails on mine a tiny bit thicker. I slid the front hook back far enough that it would not foul when I used split rings, and I did not round the heads enough but that was just accidental.

Here's the thing I found really interesting. With the hooks and solder on the old one, the point it balances at is 3 3/4" from the tail, which just happens to be the exact midpoint of the plug as it is 7 1/2 " long. It made me start wondering if that was how they determined how much solder to add. With the solder it is evenly balanced front half to back half. My dad just knew they always did a certain number of wraps of solder, so I wonder if the fact that it was balanced is just a concidence.

Here's what I've got in mine...The pencil line on the blank is where it balances with hooks and wire.

[Hilo_Kawika]

Hi Diggin Jiggin,

Thanks very much for sharing so many details of your dad's modification of the plug and your yours as well. I wonder if you'd give a little more detail about the solder wrapping. I'm new to this type of fishing and am having a little difficulty understanding where the solder was actually wrapped on the plug.

I also wonder if the wrapping was done just to add weight and/or to improve the casting qualities of the plug - greater distance / less tumbling. Any further thoughts you might have on this would be appreciated.

[ProfessorM]

Nice job, Was wondering what does adding all that tail weight do to the action of the plug? P.

[Diggin Jiggin]

Paul, in calm water you would need to reel these fairly fast to get them to swim. In fast water like at an outflow when the tide is dropping out, these will swim nice and lazy in the fast current.

Where my dad and I fish them is the base of a very long, fast rip. You cast out to the front edge and let the current pull it thru. Once it's in the current you won't even need to reel, the flow of the water pulling against it makes it swim. The lead helps the cast and slows it down so its not wobbling back and forth a 100 miles an hour in the current..

On an open beach these would be useless.

[ProfessorM]

Thanks for the info.

[Big Rick]

I have been using a remnant from the days I used to build RC planes to balance my plugs.

My balancer is from Tower Hobbies and it is great for finding both the center of gravity and correcting / adjusting the balance of your plugs. Easy enough to make your own but this one was pretty cheap .

I get my epoxy and CA from them too (mostly by habit).

[Lower]

Nicely done DJ! A classic example of the advantages of buiding you own plugs.

[NIB]

Yes indeed building ur own an investigating past producers helps to understand what makes em work.
It has made me a better fisherman also.
DJ good investigative work.As I read the thread evertime someone posted a question I had a answer only to see u did already..

Nicely done..

[Hilo_Kawika]

I'm curious about the plug balancing procedure.

When the plug is at rest, the belly hooks hang more or less vertically and the plug has one center of balance. But when the lure is moving don't the belly hooks now lie against the surface of the lure and shift the center of balance further back?

I don't suppose it matters as long as you have some consistent procedure for weighting that you're comfortable with but I just wondered if anyone else had considered this.

[Diggin Jiggin]

Hilo, while it was interesting to me that the plug was balanced, and I made mine the same way, it did not have to be.

Lots of swimmers are weighted lots of different ways. If you think about a pikie, the weight is up under the chin and almost all its weight is carried forward of its mid point, but they still swim great.

There's a lot of variables to play with, this is just one of em...

[gone fishin]

Just for my two cents...when I used the 40 in rough water many moons ago I modified the plug with a few wraps of lead solder on the rear. It allowed us to tune the plug according to where we used em. They worked great at pips rip....