Not all molds have the accessory lamination plate available. This is when you make your own. The company made lamination plate shoots just one side of the mold so you have little waste to re-melt or toss. The hand made plates simply split the mold in half, but pouring both simultaneously. You do end up with a split sprue, but that is easily trimmed off with the baits still in the mold and the second half of the mold considered discard comes off super easy too.
I have the super fry mold along with the factory made lam plate. The plate shoots the TOP cavity of the bait, where I like using the plate to do the bottom. I like the top and the tail the same color. I just measured the guide pin location on the opposite corner of the factory plate, did a drill job and use the same plate on the bottom cavities now, but it is still able to shoot the tops.
Personally I feel that hand pouring is the ticket. You can pour partial fills in any cavity quickly and easily. Very important here is that the hand poured cavity fill DOES NOT come out of the cavity ever until the bait is finished so getting plastic shooting UNDER a belly that got pulled out during the plate removal just doesn't happen. The natural surface tension holding the hand poured pieces in place is very, very tight. Additionally, and I just commented on this in another post, is that when shooting a bait to
appear natural you do not have straight lines running from front to back on the bait. Nature doesn't have a lot of straight anything on anything alive. The hand poured components tend to melt into neighboring colors while plate make a stark separation between color.
Plates, whether factory made or hand made, offer a mold a lot of flexibility, but they come at a cost. Hand pouring is cheap in comparison and the flexibility in bait creation afforded with a plate is perhaps amplified by ten when you hand pour. Plates have limits. Hand pouring is basically limitless.
Here is a picture showing the super fry mold, opened and the lamination plate that I altered to fit the side of the mold showing, the belly/tail section. The black arrows point to the holes which I have drilled to get the flexibility out of the plate that I wanted. The plate is actually designed and made to fit the other half of the mold.
Also shown here is a hand cut plate made of the punch metal I mentioned. I know Andy has used a similar product from the same source. Note the name on the plate as small fry. Also note the two alignment holes. The small fry mold has one alignment pin and one of the holes is for that mold. The nano fry has the same one pin but I can flip this plate over using the other hole and it fits my nano mold to a tee.
I'll add a little more here about the differences between plate use and hand pouring that has to do with plastic color. Many times different colors of plastic are desired in a single bait and the advent of these plates is great to achieve the results wanted. IF you hand pour and the colors just don't seem to spate enough and you do not want to strengthen the color by adding more to the plastic, the plate comes into play. The stark flat plane the plate creates acts as a mirror for the color that goes on top of the flat side even if the color is fairly transparent. Light enters that top plastic but as it hits the flat surface inside the bait it bounces back and enhances the color it just went thru. IF you add hi lite to the top color, light reflection is more intense than if you have a simple color. Glitteris not the key because glitter is multi-faceted and throws light around in an indiscriminate fashion. The flat plane is your friend in this instance.
