One of my best all-time, tried and true, baits has been the venerable old Rapala with the black back over gold belly. I have the Raps in every size from 0 to size 13, both floating and sinking. The clear blades I like to paint hot orange. The smallest two or three sizes of this color is a hot bait for trout in a local lake, some days the floater gets it, others the sinker gets it. Just a darned good bait.
Well boredom got me yesterday so I started the annual run thru the tackle closet and began going thru the various kinds of tackle I use and I came across the trout box loaded with , what else. I sat the box aside and finished up with my re-organizing and then came back to the trout box. And my small fry box. What had me was the gold belly on those Raps. One thing led to another and here is what I came up with.
I've taken 11 pics of this arrangement in various lights and shadows trying to get the gold belly to fire up and this is as good as it gets. You can see in the bottom fry that the gold comes out not too bad, but in the hand these guys look gold plated...just one of the miseries of clearer plastic.
The hot orange throat patch gets dabbed in the front of the bottom [has the tail] cavities using a bamboo skewer. I run the temp up on the orange to keep it fluid and I use scrap plastic. If it singes I don't mind and just heat up another ounce or two of clean scrap. I only do an ounce, two ounces tops, at a time to do the throats.
The gold belly....again a smaller batch since I hand pour the belly section using my infamous spoon.
I mix up 2 ounces of clear plastic with a good dose of stabilizer. Starting with gold hi lite, I add maybe 1/4 tsp to the plastic and just a shot of orange hi lite. About 1/4 tsp of fine gold glitter goes in the plastic along with a couple dashes of fine copper glitter. The copper glitter and orange hi lite helps to add some depth to the gold so not a lot of either are needed and can probably be omitted. I cook the plastic to a temp of 360, stiir it three times after the initial gelling takes place. I put a small puddle of the plastic on the back of a mold to see how the gold hi lite looks. If its not strong enough, I add a dab more and stir it in. It should look like the the plastic is gold plated. When I get the gold plastic to this point, I re-heat only enough to spoon it into the mold cavities being sure to run it up to the back edge of the orange and to be certain the cavities are not too full and hamper injecting the top color.
The top color here is simply a loose black, definely not a solid black but not smoke either. I've added the gold and copper glitter to the black [to taste] as well as a tiny bit of gold hi lite. The gold hi lite does not stand out real strong and does not show up in the pic, but in the hand it offers the slightest accent to the finished bait.
I've got a couple dozen of these put together now and they'll go in a zip lock along with some small jigs and ride out to the trout lake with their old age cousins to see if those wiley old troutskis like one better than the other. As soon as the couple feet of while goes away and the couple feet of ice on that particular lake goes to pot, I'll be making the trip. Be a couple days at least. But I'm ready to see how my handi-work works.
