gengberg October 24th, 2008
Welcome to Gary Yamamoto’s Ezine NewsletterOctober 17, 2008 ~ Vol. 9 No. 33
Gary Yamamoto’s Ezine is the best way for our customers, friends, anglers, tackle shops, retailers, distributors, the press and the media to find out first about the newest Yamamoto products, press releases, hot new colors, top pro tips and industry-leading research on innovative fishing tactics.
Crankbait Tuning Tutorial ~ Part One
Surveys say the average bass angler owns more crankbaits than any other lure. Crankbaits are the most popular bass fishing lure of all.
But what if you did a survey of your crankbaits themselves? Chances are you’d find that one in every four crankbaits may never work well. Two will only ever be average, and only one treasured crank of every four will entice most all your crankbait bites.
This phenomena doesn’t apply only to bargain bin baits. Price is not a factor here. You will get low and average performers as well as superstars in every bunch of high-dollar dolls too.
So what is the biggest mistake I see crankbait anglers make? It is fishing with those two to three out of every four crankbaits that have limited chance to succeed.
Over a season or two, say a guy buys twenty cranks. He never does exceptionally well with most of them, and he thinks crankbait fishing is overrated. Fact is, ten of those twenty lures are only ever average. Five are unadulterated duds. And the other five that have the best chance, he may never tune them to unlock their maximum potential. Maybe he doesn’t know how to tune them or what to look for when tuning them? Soon, he takes up golf or gardening as a hobby that is more rewarding than fishing with his sorry lot of crankbaits. That’s a sad story.
Like a garden, your crankbait patch needs to be pruned and groomed regularly. Lures that are not catching fish are dead wood. You need to weed them out so that more productive crankbaits can replace them.
The process to separate good cranks from bad can start before you even take them out of the package. Actually, it can start before you even buy them.
The critical crankbait selection process is a situation where walk-in shopping lets you do one thing that’s not possible with mail order or online ordering. You have a chance to inspect the troops lined up for display on the store shelf. When the shopkeeper or sales associate is not looking, rummage through a rack of cranks in order to cherry pick the ones where the two body halves look sealed together properly, with no mismatches on the seams. Look for a neat seam seal that did not need remedial sanding or smoothing on the seam.
As hot plastic cools and cures out of the injection mold, it can shrink and cause a dimple or pucker rather consistently at the same spot on a lure body. Ideally, you want to bypass those with any dips or indents in the plastic body. Avoid any heavy drips in the paint, no sags or runs in the topcoat finish.
In terms of glue or whatever solvent used to seal the two halves of a lure together, look for it to be clear and not run over the seams. Avoid seams that seem to have bubbly or cloudy glue or sealant. Often the glue is painted over with a solid lure color, so you cannot see under the paint. However, the diving lips tend to be clear, where you can get an indication of what the glue’s like or how the sealing process went, and inspect around the posts where the figure-eight hook hangers are held in the lure. Look for clear, not hazy or cloudy and bubble-free glue or closure around the hook hanger posts.
Look at the hook hangers eyelets to ensure each is seated properly in the bait, that a hook eye isn’t cockeyed. Make sure plastic flowed fully and formed properly around the sprue stem slot for each hook hanger eye. Sometimes the assembly leaves a hollow space in between the two wire stems of an eye or you can see where an air pocket formed there when paint was applied, and you don’t want that. The front eye is most critical. That is the pull point that needs to be solidly set inside the lure.
On transparent colored lures, look at every weight ball or rattle bead inside. Occasionally, an internal ball or bead may get glued against a body seam or somehow stuck inside.
Some models of cranks, including most wood ones, are made with the diving lip glued in as a separate piece. On these, try to inspect both sides where the lip adjoins the body, to make sure the lip is not slightly set off to one side or another. On wood baits, there can be even more variability as to how the hook eyes and any body weights are inserted into the wood body.
Overall, any variances, no matter how slight, they are reasons to bypass such crankbaits. It’s not that they won’t work, but odds are they will be more unpredictable in their performance. Sometimes that little irregularity can make them better-than-average. Most often, it makes them, well, inconsistent - a little more of a gamble.
Every crankbait vendor or brand has different construction or assembly characteristics. None are entirely perfect, so don’t expect them to be. Get a feel for each vendor or brand. Some have more likelihood of certain assembly variances than others. These aren’t defects, it’s just how the baits are made. So don’t have unrealistic expectations that a crankbait should be made this or that way without any variance. They are what they are, and many crankbait vendors produce great baits that all have some variability from one to another. That variability is reasonable and expected. For every dozen cranks one randomly chooses from most any vendor, odds are that three will excel, three may never work well and the other six will only ever be average. Continue Reading »
