D.I.Y. LURES
Making your own lures is great fun! D.I.Y. lures are very satisfying to fish with, they save you money into the bargain and you can let your imagination run riot and your experimentation go wild — and, even when you can't go fishing because of flood conditions or any other reason, there's always plenty of fun to be had making your very own lures.

However fat or thin your wallet might be, there's always that bit of sadness when you lose a lure, whether or not it is cheap or expensive, difficult or easy to replace. Also, if you are fishing with an expensive lure, or any lure for that matter, you often think twice about casting into that very snaggy and difficult spot — you know the one, the one where that 6 lb chub or 20 lb pike just has to be! Well, with a bit of DIY, you can overcome all these feelings and reservations at a stroke!

Chub, perch, trout, pike and zander
Whichever species you're after, be it chub, perch, trout, pike or zander, lure-fishing is a very effective method and DIY lure-making means that you can design and tune your very own lures to suit your own particular venues. By definition, all commercial mass-produced lures have to be a compromise one way or another — by making your own, you can have exactly the lure you want, and at much lower cost.

Cheap and Easy
Spinners of course are the easiest and cheapest lures to make, and none the less effective for that! Spinnerbaits are just as easy when it comes to DIY too. Excluding the cost of an essential high-quality hook, a good spinner will cost less than 50p — less than the cost of the hook probably! Yes, here I must emphasise very strongly that you shouldn't compromise the quality and catching ability of your DIY lures by fitting them with cheap-and-nasty hooks, thus "spoiling the ship for a ha'pp'orth of tar" as they say.

Many's the time I've read elsewhere about DIY lure-making and seen claims that “a good spinner can be made for 30p or less” — and when I've looked at the hook, I can believe it! Poor hooks mean poor results — it's a simple as that !

Simple Tools
You only need a few very basic tools to make your own lures — a pair of thin-tip long-nosed pliers, wire-cutters, hand-drill, screw-driver, Stanley knife and a file will meet most of your needs!

The thin-tip long-nosed pliers will come in particularly handy for twisting-up the wire looops at the ends of your DIY spinner shafts, and, to be honest, that's one of the most difficult and fiddly bits — the knack is to get the correct length of wire to start with, and this will come with experience!

The flexibility that making your own DIY spinners gives you is fantastic — you're in total control of everything — blade size and shape, body length and weight, and so on. Spoons and spinner-baits are even more straightforward.

Hooks and Split-rings
What hooks should you use and where can you buy them? Well, Eagle Claw are a very popular brand of everyday hooks but personally I prefer to use Kamasan, Gamakatsu, Partridge, Drennan Extra Strong and Ashima Supreme — barbless or whisker-barbed ones — granted they are more expensive but they are stronger and seem to stay sharper longer.

Of course, with any lure, home-made or otherwise, there's always the DIY option to fit double or single hooks instead of trebles and if, for example, you choose weed-guarded single hooks, you can make your lures much less likely to snag, so you get more of them back!

And please don't skimp on split-rings — they're a vital component in your lure-end tackle. Always use split-rings because they'll give you better hook-sets and make it much easier to replace hooks when necessary but it's a false economy to make nice DIY lures, to buy good hooks and then to add weak links in the form of inferior split-rings.

Hackles are favourite
I'm a big fan of hackled hooks! They give me added confidence and I'm pretty convinced that they deliver better results — difficult to prove though !

It's easy to add feathers, wool or fluorescent red tubing to hook shanks and I'd strongly recommend this when you're DIY lure-making — you've got nothing to lose and everything to gain.

So, as far as D.I.Y spinners are concerned, the truth is that, including a decent treble hook and split-ring, they'll probably cost about £1. Now I reckon that that compares very favourably with shop prices which will be 50p higher or more for the larger sizes.

Get more daring
Even though fishing with cheaper home-made lures may make you feel quite a lot more daring about casting into snaggy areas, the down-side is that you may find that you get more fond of your own lures than of shop-bought ones so, in spite of their lower cost, loosing DIY ones may make you feel more sad when you lose one — you just can't win!

Of course, there's no getting-away from the fact that you need a good selection of ready-made shop-bought lures in your collection but that said, there's always the option of some DIY lure-making. Most DIY lure enthusiasts will confirm that it's hard to beat the satisfaction you get from catching predators with your very own home-made DIY lures.

Component suppliers
In the UK there are several sources of good DIY lure-making materials, many of them mail-order. If you have trouble finding them, you can email the Editor, Nick Caine, who'll be only too pleased to help.

Also, there's nothing to stop you from over-painting other lures. All you need is a small bottle of white correcting fluid e.g. Tippex, and a selection of water-proof felt-tipped pens in gold, silver, black, red, green and blue — all the standard colours. You can get them from WH Smiths or any other good stationers or art shop. Use the Tippex to over-paint your lure: this provides a base under-coat for your custom designs! And of course, it's easy and very cheap to repair your custom paint job plug when it has suffered too much tooth damage.

If you want to take things to a higher level, then the little tins of Humbrol Art Oil enamel paints are excellent and offer a huge range of colours, both matt and gloss. It's a good idea to give your finished lure a good coat of transparent epoxy-resin varnish — this will stand it in good stead when it's subjected to those needle-sharp teeth of pike and other predators. I used to regularly re-varnish my DIY lures but these days I tend to simply repair and re-paint them ready for their next outing.

Stateside suppliers
There is also a number of excellent suppliers of lure-making components in the States -- they're too numerous to list here -- you can email the Editor, Nick Caine, NickCaine @ Talk21.com for further details -- but stuff can take quite a while to arrive from the States and I find that when I'm making my own lures, I'm always in a rush and so purely for the sake of speed and convenience, I tend to get most of my components from the UK sources that I've mentioned.

Also for high-quality hooks, split rings and so on, there's now another new mail-order supplier on the block — they're called LureNetQFP and they've a brand-new fun web-site at www.lurenet.co.uk — have a look: you'll like it!

Pukka Paint Jobs
Sometimes you can get a job-lot of lures very cheaply because for example they might have rather naff colour patterns that won't sell! But it's no problem to turn them into exactly the design and colours you want .... it's out with the Tippex and off you go! And it's worth trying-out your all-white lure first, before you add any other colours. You'll be very pleasantly surprised at the results especially when the water is slightly coloured.

After that my first step is often simply to colour the head of the lure red and you'll soon see why red-head lures have a big following by anglers and predators. Of course, you can go to the other extreme and try all-black lures, or black & white contrasty patterns and so on .... the possibilities are almost limitless. The slight extra weight of the paint can sometimes marginally affect your lure's action but I've never found it to be a big problem — in fact if anything, I've found that it's beneficial because the resulting lure is slightly less buoyant.

Almost any wood will do !
Another very simple option for making buoyant surface and shallow-diving plugs is to hand-carve them out of balsa wood available from any model shop - it only takes a few minutes with a Stanley-knife and some sand-paper. Spinner shaft wire is easy to push through the balsa plug and to twist into hook-hanger and trace-link eyes.

You can of course use woods other than balsa: it's just that they take quite a bit longer to carve into shape. Also you may need to screw-and-glue hook-hanger eyes rather than using wire. Personally I prefer to use balsa because, being soft, I just have this feeling that pike hold on to balsa plugs more confidently compared with hard-bodied lures, but maybe it's just my imagination ..... but after all, it's confidence that counts!

Painting your hand-crafted plug can give a lot of pleasure and satisfaction but if you can't wait to get-out to fish with your newly-made lure, don't worry, un-painted wooden plugs will still get good results. Of course, with spinners it's a different matter, it's instant lure-fishing, just add water (and predatory fish of course!)

Big advantages
One of the biggest advantages of DIY lure-making is that you can overcome the limitations otherwise imposed on your fishing by mass-produced spinners and spoons with fixed sizes and blade-to-body-weight ratios.

For example, by this I mean that with shop-bought spinners, you invariably get a big-bladed spinner with a heavy body, but what if you want a spinner with a large blade and very light body for surface fishing? Or a very heavy spinner with a small blade? You just can't buy spinners with these combinations, and so there's only one alternative and that's to make your own.

For example, one of my most effective DIY spinner designs is a large French-style blade e.g. size No.5 on a wire shaft with no weighted spinner body at all! I just use a Waddington fly tube as the spinner body and it works wonders for surface fishing or spinning in slow-moving waters.

If you want an ace reference book which gives a step-by-step pictorial guide to D.I.Y. lure-making, get hold of a copy of Charlie Bettell's book "The Art of Lure Fishing" — it's packed with good practical advice — if you have problems locating a copy, you can e-mail Charlie charlie@esox.co.uk who'll be only too pleased to help.

Hybrids are the Biz
Also, once you've mastered DIY spinner, plug, spoon and spinner-bait making, the possibilities are almost endless, especially as far as hybrid combination lures are concerned — you can add one of your DIY spinners to plugs, spoons, flies, soft plastic baits, or vice versa, and so on!

Making hybrid lures based on ready-made ones is one of the easiest ways to get started as far as DIY lure-making is concerned — in fact, I caught my one-time Personal Best Lure-caught pike on a DIY spinner-plug hybrid ( a combination of a French-style spinner-blade and a lip-less Mirrolure plug) and the tremendous feeling of satisfaction is still with me today, many years afterwards, and I've still got that hybrid lure, although it's in permanent retirement now!

Tail-ends
Soft rubber teaser-tails aren't only the domain of jerk-baits — you can add them to just about any lure you like — sure, you'll end-up with a very different action — might be better, might be worse — it's all part of the fun and experimentation you can have with D.I.Y. lure-making — test them out in the bath, but make sure the occupant doesn't mind !

Whatever you do DIY-wise, it's certain to enhance your lure-fishing fun and save you money into the bargain, so YOU SIMPLY MUST TRY D.I.Y. — have fun ! .

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