Why Make Your Own Lures?

Some people might ask why anyone would want to make their own fishing lures when there is such a huge selection of quality lures available on the retail market, from hundreds of different fishing tackle manufacturers.

Good question! Let me answer that for you.

Walking into a store and plunking your money down for a mass-manufactured bait seems OK because there is such a vast selection of lures to choose from. You see what you want and you buy it. Pretty simple, right?

But what about if you can’t find the color or style you’re looking for? Or what about if they have the style and a color that’s almost right, but not the exact right color combination? At this point, you’re stuck. Or so it would seem anyway.

Here’s where making your own fishing lures comes into play and helps you to have the exact lure you’re looking for.

After you’ve discovered that you can’t find the right color or style lure, you need to fid a good source for lure parts and components and begin to figure out exactly what you’ll need in order to make the baits you want.

Let’s use spinnerbaits for an example.

With spinnerbaits, you have some core components and then some optional components.

The core components are the wire, the hook, the skirt, the swivel and the blade. These items would give you enough materials to build a single-spin spinnerbait from scratch.

Now let’s say that you decide to buy spinnerbait heads/bodies that are already poured and painted. This would give you 2 of the components (wire and hook) in one ready-to-use unit. This would save you the trouble of buying the individual parts, pouring the lead and painting the head. All you’d need to add would be the skirt, swivel and blade.

So here’s where it gets fun. Now you can choose your own skirt color, blade style, finish, shape, size, etc. You’re no longer limited to what the mass manufacturers say you have to buy or use.

So you choose your favorite combination of colors, styles and sizes and begin to put your bait together. In less than 5 minutes you have your very own custom-built spinnerbait that you can take to the lake and catch fish with! Once you start catching fish on this bait you’ll start to gain confidence in your baits and it won’t be long before you’re buying all kinds of lure parts to experiment with.

After you’ve gotten used to designing, building and fishing with your own baits, you’ll find yourself buying less and less retail lures.

Now go make yourself some lures and have fun catching fish on them!