Custom Baits Magazine | Page 17

Making The Throughwires for the Lures Fitting the Throughwires to the Homemade Making a throughwire from copper wire is quite easy Lures as copper wire is reasonably soft and easy to bend by hand. The use of a pliers however will make she shaping and bending of the wire much easier. The size and shape of the throughwire was determined by referring back to the lure template. The positions of the hook eyes and line tie are marked onto the template and lines are drawn onto the template to represent the position of the throughwire within the lure. These lines create a 'T' shape as shown in the photo below which gives you the actual size and shape of the throughwire for the lure. The wire is then bent into this 'T' shape making sure that the loops formed in the ends of the throughwire stick out from the body of the lure enough to allow the fitting of split rings and hooks later on. At this stage I'm almost ready to go ahead and fit the throughwires into the lure bodies. First however we need to check that each throughwire fits snugly into each lure body and that the hook eyes and line tie are sitting in the correct positions. At this point I realised that I had made my first mistake - the slots that I had cut into the lure bodies using a tennon saw were not nearly wide enough to allow the throughwires to slide into them. To be fair the copper wire that I used to make the throughwires was probably a little on the heavy side (too thick) for the job and a thinner wire would have fitted into the already cut slots neatly. I had to widen the throughwire slots on each lure using a padsaw which has a wider blade than the tennon saw (commonly used for making cutouts in drywall) as shown below. After the throughwire slots on each lure were widened the throughwires themselves were offered into each lure to check that they were sitting correctly and minor adjustments were made where necessary.