Chawstone?
Body: homemade gooey-soft sheeting made from worm resin poured onto a tupperware dishpan. That layer is later on covered with a brown-spotted but unknown soft plastic sheeting (free samples from a distributor). Lead weight sandwiched between the two sheets in the thorax area, and then wrapped on a needle. Slide it off the needle. Sew in a few rubber legs. Mount a scud hook on top, bedded into CA glue. The weight is on the under-side of sharply-curved scud hook, which forces the hook to ride up at all times.
It’s gooey soft and flexible from end to end.
Fish bite, hang on and swim away while slowly chewing.
It is a bit time consuming to make at this point. But it doesn’t have to stay that way.
Prototypes have a three step process:
- make one at any cost
- see if it works
- figure out how to make it quicker, if and only if step two is promising.
I’m already past one and two, and working on step three.
This one is worth working on. This is a fish catching sonofagun.
Really.
Relative to the discussion on the other site…re: using a mold…
http://otetackle.com/materials/bodies-parts/bug-partz
Here’s another one, this one snipped out of a factory-molded bass worm. The thorax is split with scissors in order to bury a flattened piece of solid wire solder for weight, and then wrapped with spawn sack (ephemeral nylon netting) in order to keep the thread wraps from cutting into the soft rubbery body.
Closed-cell foam, various rubbery plastic sheeting materials and crinkly plastic fibers are accepted by most tiers as part of the lexicon now. But any new material that carries even the remotest association with spinning or bait casting equipment–like soft flexible worm material–does cause some to wrinkle their eyebrows and frown with disgusted disapproval. Which is interesting, because the difference between worm resin and foam has to be seen as cultural rather than chemical.
Soft flies do make a difference. Can fish sense the tactile difference between soft gooey objects and hard surfaces using their mysterious lateral line sensors? I’m not sure about that possibility. But fish do react differently after the bite. With flies (flyrod lures) like these the fish do not let go. They hang on and chew with determination–often swimming off carrying the nymph all the way back to their hiding places.
