Melting Scrap

[acwatkins]

First post here and I must say this forum is going to be extremely helpful so thank you in advance! I've been cleaning out my lure wall for the upcoming season and have a heaping pile of soft plastics that I do not use. Id like to melt them down and make them into senkos and rippers. I recall a suggestion of adding either softener or hardener the last time I read something about re-melting but I do not remember which??? Which one is it and is it in fact necessary? Can I add coloring/glitters to tweak the colors? Thank You!

[Lamar]

 When I first started making my own plastics I took all those bags and bags of lures I had laying around and separated them and then remellted them. The lighter colors I added heat stabilizer but that's all I did. I wouldn't  try to do that with any gulp products. And if you have a bunch of odd colors just add black colorant. Who doesn't use black ?

[ctom]

Welcome aboard AC.

Just like Lamar offered up, I take the really heavily scented baits out of the pile as sometimes that scenting smells foul while the plastics remelt. Softener or hardener should not be needed but a few drops of stabilizer won't hurt since it helps protect the lighter color plastic. Once the plastic is melted you can add glitter and/or hi lite to it to get some nice visual effects and most any color except the fluorescent colors can be added to the hot plastic. The fluorescent colors need to go, or should go, into cold raw plastic.

[acwatkins]

Perfect, thanks guys. Conveniently they're mostly dark(-ish) colors.  I think I'll try melting without any stabilizer since I don't have any and see what happens.

[DF]

Chop your scraps into small chuncks, heat low and slow

[Lines]

Good call by DF. The smaller the chunks the better.

[bassinfool]

I'd like to add that if you're melting store bought plastics I would avoid PowerBait by Berkley along with their Glup! baits as Lamar mentioned.  Whenever I do remelts I like to add a very small amount of raw plastisol to the cup just to coat most of the scrap.  This seems to help the melting process and keeps the scraps from wanting to burn/change their color as much.