Some play time with the little 3.75" Zipper Dropshot worm came along today. Lets just say the bait is challenging if you want to do something more than a separate tail color. But a laminate can be done!
The body of the mold is a bit different with one side being deeper than the other. I had to spend some time deciding which side of the mold to hand pour and which to inject. Then it was maybe I should hand pour the deeper side only not fill the runs as full. I settled on hand pouring the shallow, or bottom, side of the mold using the thin Florida Grape [I think that's the name of it] X2 with garnet, blue, purple glitters and violet hi lites added. The chartreuse is the X2 mixed for another project and re-heated for this session.
The fire tail is X2 as well, nothing else in it but color.
For those who like eyes, the button head will handle a 3mm eye. I didn't apply any here but I did stick a 3mm eye on and it fit just fine.
For most of my hand pouring I like the plastic to run about 335-340 degrees but the narrow cavities of this mold had me adding some stabilizer and coaxing the temp to around 355 to get good clean pours that laid down. I also found that I had to hold the pour back from the gate end a little and I had to stop just before the tail section began. Tolerances are pretty tight in this mold and if I got even a little over-zealous with the plastic I'd have issues when I injected. The tail shots are a snap though.
I can see walleye teeth set into these as they are jigged on a lighter jig. I can see crappies hanging on the jig when a shortened worm is used. Mr. Little from the site here is the Master of Smallmouth and Largemouth Bass using this worm, but the bait lends itself nicely to all sorts of fish. I shot these using the soft formula, but medium works just as well....I've shot several different solid colors using the medium plastic with very good results jigging walleyes and crappies on a test basis last fall. This is a great mold to shot simple colors in but if you don't mind the challenges that come with two color shots the mold puts out some really sweet looking baits and the baits are fish producers.
