Heddon flap tail.. remake - Striper Talk Striped Bass Fishing, Surfcasting, Boating

Rockfish9 · 11-16-2007, 08:23 AM

First a little history,while fishing the mouth of the Merrimack river in the early '80's I caught a 38lb bass, imbedded in the tail was a plug, not my plug, someone elses.... being more concerned with filling the box with fish, I tossed it(the plug) into a bucket.. from the bucket it found it's way into an old fruit crate with other tackle destined to be worked on latter....

Fast forward October 2007, I moved into this house 3 years ago and have gradualy been putting my shop together and getting rid of all the old things( mostly from my now grown up children) and reorginising my shop/basement.... well in the corner burried under a pile of misc crap was the musty old fruit box, this fall I withdrew from the snarl of monofiliment, monel wire, lead core and dozens of other old plugs, that old heddon flap tail... so My first turning of the new season was a walk down memory lane with this handsome plug.

My build: I wanted to as closely as resonably possible,replicate the original,turning the body was the easy part... after taking multiple measurments and writing them down on an index card I marked out the plug before removing the square ends, I ran lines fore and aft on all four quardrants to aid in the laying out of the plug, belly holes were marked, as were the locations on the screws that would retain the hook hangers, pull eye and flap tail itself..

I drilled out the belly and weight holes as well as the hole for the pull eye and the screws for securing the hook hangers...

I mounted the blank on a jig using the belly holes to keep the plug oriented...
I then cut out a piece of graf paper slightly larger than the face/cheeks of the plug, I lightly sprayed adhesive on the back and stuck it to the face of the plug, using a carpenters pensic,I shadowed the outline of the cheek, I then removed the "stencil" and reglued it to a piece of lexan and cut it out on the scroll saw to form a solid,traceable template, I then roughed out the face and cheeks with a 1" drum sander, once the nose bridge was rough formed, I then traced my lexan template onto each cheek, I finished the cheeks with a dremal tool...
The original hook hangers were stamped stanless, I formed mine from 308L wire, the original pull eye was a dead wringer for a linkof toilet bowl flush chain, that is what I used... there was a soldered brass pull ring attatched to the pull eye.... easy to copy... I prpbably could have bought the flap tail, but half the fun of building is to fabricat your own parts, so I traced the original onto graf paper and made a lexan template, I cut mine out of sheet brass,I cut it out with a pair of shears and finished it with a series of stones and my dremal tool, to make the concave in the tail, I made a simple die out of a block of hard wood, traced my lexan template onto it, using a ball rasp and my drill press I milled out a shallow depresin in the middle... now I place my falp tail onto the traced out/milled out die, I rounded off the end of a hard wood dowel to make a punch,one whack of a hammer on the hard wood dowel was enought o make a nice beval in the tail, just like the origianl.
I then sealed the plug in my usal manner ( 60/40 BLO)...once the sealer, the plug was primed... as a matter of convience, I used acrylic water based paint to paint the plug, I clear coated it with envirotex spray ( 5 coats) and assembled my plug... I tested it last night on a local pond in the driving rain, it swims just like the original...

I'm not goint to fish this one,It is going to my son as a Christmas gift... you can bet I'll be making a few more this winter...

Here is a picture of the original as well as the remake... in the next post I'll post a close up of it...

Rockfish9 · 11-16-2007, 08:27 AM

in this picture is my copy of the heddon flap tail, also a copy of a Charles Russo flap tail that I made at the same time, the Chas russo as made in a simular manner, but was a much simpeler plug to make...