Since its almost illegal to live anymore I have had some time in the clean shop to play with molds I haven't messed with in a while, this Canadian paddletail being one of those. The first couple of injections had lines of tiny bubbles running thru the bodies after injecting a second color to weld the tails so I parked it until we warmed up a bit more....which got us to yesterday. It rained most of the day so I put some heat in the shop and brought plastic from in the house out and worked with it to get two color shot to see if the warmer atmosphere took care of the bubbles. It did. So now today I'll go back out, turn the tunes up high, pour a bit of bourbon in my nice little sipping glass and go to town with this mold hoping to make up a nice box of about ten color variations.
I don't know if it was cooking ice cold plastic that made tiny bubbles in the plastic or if the cold created a tiny air leak in the injector or just what the cause was but I didn't care for the bubbles in there. Honestly though the small lines of minute bubbles would offer more surfaces inside the baits for light to bounce off from which would be good and they certainly would not have compromised the strength of the plastic so they probably didn't mean much since selling was not happening. They're currently in the pile [but not in this picture] to go into the box and will get fished.
Everything seen here is a Do-It product. The chartreuse really took of after I added a wee bit of blue hi lite to the juice. It doesn't show up well in the picture, but the blue hi lite helps bring the x2 green chartreuse out a bit stronger when mixed with the regular X2 chartreuse for the tail color but really make the color in the picture snap to attention. Violet hi lite in chartreuse is another great twister for the plastic color. Not much of either hi lite will make chartreuse, or a blend like I made here, really pop. In sunlight this chartreuse just glows and in this picture its no exception to that using just natural light coming thru the shop window with shaded sunshine.
The glitter I mix in bulk and is called my bluegill mix and goes straight into clear plastic after getting to the 350 degree conversion temperature. Equal parts of blue, green, purple and copper glitters. This plastic/glitter blend can be re-heated about three times before any bleeding is seen in the plastic. On re-heats I may or may not get a clear base plastic. Since the combination of glitters can be fickle to heat I make this in relatively small batches to get around the issue.
