I got a hold of some silica based pearls and thought I'd give them a try in the Nano mold. They are different.
First, I need to make a lamination plate that made the belly half of the bodies, not the backs, as the bellies needed to be done in black for the pearls to "work". Next, I injected the chartreuse with a drop of white to harvest tail pieces. After clipping the tails and re-inserting them in the cavities I laid the new plate in the mold and injected the black, this gave me the bellies, and the tails got welded. Next, I whipped up 4 small bowls with about an ounce of plastic in each and stirred in the four colors of the new pearls. There are two green ones that are very close to one another but one is a hair bluer but probably harder to see in the picture. There is separation between the two greens though. After injecting the four pearls I added eyes and gave the lot a cover dip of clear.
I'm not heating the shop yet and my plastic for the pearls and cover dip was at about 48 degrees when it got cooked and I ended up with some micro bubbles. Not a ton, but enough to mess with the picture of course. Aside from that distraction, they turned out pretty decent. We have clouds today so the picture is somewhat muted but those silica based pearls are very, very brilliant. Three of the pearl colors are white particle and are invisible in the clear plastic. The copper colored one has a stain in it that shows up in the clear, but the other three are basically not there when viewed from the side which is kind of catchy when viewing the baits.
That Nano can be a challenge when splitting colors, adding harvested parts and then getting to cover dip on in a decent fashion but they do make a nice panfish bait for when the water temps are dropping and the sunnies and crappies are on the cussp of going deep and getting tight lipped.
