What you need to start airbrushing custom crankbaits.
I have never been a particularly good artist. However, I would consider myself artistic. I can see it in my mind but struggle to translate it to any particular medium. So I never in a million years thought I would be able to hand-paint my own baits. Enter some idle Sunday watching a channel on youtube called Baker Builds. And his way of making it look easy and explaining it in such a way that I convinced myself “I could do that”. It took me a while to gather the equipment but a few weeks later I was spraying away in my garage. I have come a long way since then and most certainly improved my technique tenfold but, I am not pro by any means. There is no way I could possibly remember all the little things but below I will do my best, to sum up, everything you need to get going yourself. Then I would encourage you to check out Baker builds on youtube for some very well-done instructionals.
01. Airbrush and Air Compressor
My first airbrush was an Amazon special. I picked it because it came with a small purpose-built air compressor all for a reasonable price. I think I paid $80.00 for the whole kit. Spoiler alert it did not work. The “little compressor couldn’t” would not sustain the airflow required to airbrush. In my mind, it had to be the air compressor. So off I go looking for a suitable compressor. I finally settled on a Harbor freight special that came with two airbrushes for $89.00. Now I have three airbrushes, two compressors and I have never put one drop of paint on anything resembling a bait. So the lesson to be learned from my mistakes is to do your research and I guess if you are reading this, that’s a good start.
RECOMMENDED STARTER AIRBRUSH: Harbor Freight- Avanti Airbrush & Compressor Combo $ 119.99
ONE STEP UP AirBrush: Hobby Lobby IWATA Eclipse $149.99
02. Paint
For some reason, I had it in my mind from the beginning that airbrushing hard baits must need a different paint than what you see the guy airbrushing t-shirts at the fair used. I mean come on, It goes in the water and bangs off the rocks and digs in the gravel it has to be different right? Wrong! While I am surprised at the variety of paints that I have been able to get to work in my airbrush, all you need is a standard Createx airbrush paint. You can get a 6piece set for $27.99 at Hobby Lobby. And as for color selection, the sky is the limit. They make just about every color in the spectrum both semi-transparent and Opaque. Pay close attention to the wording on the bottle. Even though Createx does a good job calling out the type on the bottle you would not be the first person to miss it. My favorite paints to experiment with are the pearls. They add so much more depth and flash to the bait. Paint goes a really long way. We are talking about a few drops, will cover an entire bait. The one color I would suggest buying a larger bottle of is Opaque white. Think of it as the Primer coat. If you are trying to achieve a solid color scheme you will need to coat the entire bait in white before laying down the other colors. If you don’t it will take many many coats of the top colors to cover. As for additives some of the colors do require them to be thinned/Reduced so pick up a bottle of reducer. But most colors I just use straight out of the bottle. Read each bottle it will tell you if it needs it or not. The one exception is pearls. I typically use a thinner on pearls.
STARTER PAINTS: Hobby Lobby- Opaque starter kit $27.99
REDUCER: Hobby Lobby- 4012 High-performance reducer $3.99
ADDITIONAL COLORS: $4.99 per bottle
03. Clearcoat
This topic is an easy one for a beginner but the water can get deep quickly. I am currently on my third progression of clear coat and I cannot decide if I like it or not. I started with Rustoleum high-gloss clear coat. It is cheap, easy and does not make a mess. You just spray it on lightly and evenly and it looks great. The downside is that it is just not a very hard coating. It does not stand up to the abuse. My second progression was a product called KBS DIAMOND 8404 CLEAR COAT. It works great and provides what I would call a medium-hard coating. The downsides are it is $55.00, it will last a very long time but still a good chunk of change. Also, it is a dip coating. Meaning you dip the entire bait into the clear coat then it drip-dries. As you can imagine takes a while and can make a mess. My Third and current clear coat is a UV cured coating called Alumi-UV. Which on paper is going to give you the hardest coating and the quickest dry time. The caveat to that is since it is UV cured you need to put the bait under a UV light to cure. The better and higher the output of the light the faster and better the cure. I have not been able to lock down a good UV light so I get partial cures and tacky finishes. Still working on that one. There is a higher learning curve. All that being said, I would say for a beginner just a plain old spray clear works fine. Upgrade as you see fit.
SPRAY CLEAR: Home Depot- Rustoleum Crystal clear enamel $5.98
BASIC DIP CLEAR: Amazon- KBS DIAMOND 8404 $55.00
UV CLEAR COAT: Alumilite.com- Alumni-UV $99.99 (will require a high power UV light)
04. Blanks
This is the most difficult and frustrating part of this hobby in my opinion. If you put yourself in the shoes of all the most popular manufacturers of hard baits, why would they make unpainted versions of their molds available to the public? They spent countless hours of development to make them their own. Not to mention the cost to cut the tooling for the injection molds. So that leaves us home cooks with whatever you can buy online. There are some companies that make their blanks available but they are practically the same cost as a brand new packaged production baits and there is this middle ground of blanks that are available on DO-IT Mold website, Janns Net craft has some, and Barlows Tackle has a good selection, but they are pretty expensive. At least for a beginner. You are going to mess some up. Now you can do a reset by just cleaning them with rubbing alcohol and redoing the white base coat but I still recommend starting off with the cheaper options. If you go on Amazon or eBay you can buy 25-50 packs of some ok blanks in some popular bait types. For example, you can buy a 25pack of a 2.5 square bill crankbait on amazon for $ 25.00 that includes 50 eyes. The eyes are junk but they do have value. My hang-up on the direct from China blanks is the quality. I have had some of the bills crack while prepping them for paint, I have had cracked baits or poorly sealed baits so they take on water. And on top of that, some will not tune. No matter how much I try i cannot get some of them to swim straight. So to put it in perspective you spend all the time that it takes to paint and seal and clear coat a bait put all the hardware on it and it swims like a one-armed man. Or worse the bill breaks when you cast it and the last time you see it is on the horizon as it hurls itself into oblivion. But the worst part is if you sell it to someone and it fails. I would feel horrible. You can get some good ones but inspect everyone very closely.
05. Hardware
When you buy the blanks, they are naked. You will need to add a split ring to the line tie, a split ring to the hook connections, and a hook for each available spot. The size of the hardware will vary depending on the type of bait. To the rescue is a company named Janns Net Craft. They sell all kinds of lure-making components including just about everything mentioned in this article. I am even fortunate that they are in Toledo which is only about an hour and thirty from my house and they have a storefront. Getting into this hobby has opened my eyes to the almost criminal cost that tackle stores charge for hooks. Now don’t get me wrong, hooks are still very expensive even in bulk. But to put it in perspective, one of my favorite hooks to use on a square bill is the VMC9651. At Bass Pro shops you can buy a pack of 7 for $2.99. Not bad right? That’s .42 cents per hook. At Janns you can buy a 25 pack for $5.99 that’s .23 cents per hook. If you buy 100 they will drop the cost per-hook to .18 cents per hook. I will never buy a pack of hooks in a big box brick-and-mortar store ever again. That’s a lot of shipping and handling.
HOOKS: Prices may vary, Assume 18-25 cents per-hook from Janns and an Arm and a Leg at BPS.
06. Sundries
The word Sundries means articles too small or numerous to be specified. That was the best title I could think of for this section. We are talking about everything else needed to start airbrushing. I will start with the items I seem to consume the most. The first is 1” Masking tape. You can use the cheap tan stuff or the expensive stuff with the frog on it. The cheap stuff is cheap and the expensive stuff is expensive but does a better job keeping paint from bleeding under the edge and comes off easier. But I have found that if you heat the bait to be painted a little bit with a hairdryer or heat gun the tan stuff works a little better. The most common use for the tape is to cover the bills of the crankbaits. Some people just paint the bills the same as the rest of the body, but those people are wrong. Tape your bills! You will also need a hairdryer. Resist the temptation to steal the one in the bathroom, a cheap Walmart purchase may save you some marital strife. Next is some super fine sandpaper. I use 400grit and 600grit. I will cover the blanks in more detail in a bit but they all need some clean-up on the bills and the seams where the two halves of the bait were connected. The better you smooth those out the better the finished product is. Now that you have created a bunch of dust and covered the blank in finger grease you need to clean it. That is where rubbing alcohol comes into play. Use it to clean all the gunk from the surface. Once the bait is sanded, cleaned and taped you will need to free up your hands. Get yourself some helping hands. I am not telling you to go get your wife or husband to come hold the bait while you paint it. The actual product is called A Helping hands. A Helping hands is essentially a weighted base with two or more articulating arms with alligator clips on the end. I had never heard of them until getting into airbrushing but now I use them for all sorts of things. Next is a bottle or jug or even a purpose-built airbrush cleaning bottle to spray leftover paint into. I have used the airbrush cleaning bottles but they are glass and my bench is always crowded. My airbrush hose has now knocked three of them to the concrete. I use a pretzel jug with a hole in the side and a towel over the top. I think it even works better since the mouth of the jug is wide and I can clean out the airbrush bowl into the cleaning jug and don’t need a separate bowl or something to dump into. The last thing is some old-timey diner Ketchup bottles. Those I fill with water and use to clean out the bowl. Just a few more things in the sundries category. One is a collection of paintbrushes. They are pretty handy to have to both use in painting the baits and in cleaning the airbrush. I have one thick brush with short stiff bristles that I use to agitate the last little bit of paint from the bowl while cleaning. The last thing is some airbrush cleaner. Water does 90% of the heavy lifting but the airbrush cleaner solution does help at the end of the day. If I know I am going to come back in a few hours or even the next day I will fill the bowl with it and it will give you a good start when you pick it back up.
TAPE: $2.98
HAIRDRYER $5.99
SANDPAPER: $ 6.99
RUBBING ALCOHOL: $6.82
HELPING HANDS: $9.99
PRETZEL JUG: $7.99
PAINTBRUSHES: $7.99
CLEANER $9.99
Conclusion
$278.62 Dollars to get going on an extremely rewarding hobby that is an incredible outlet for creativity if that is something you are looking for. And once you get the hang of it you have custom, hand-painted crankbaits for you and your fishing buddies.
AIRBRUSH & COMPRESSOR- $119.00
PAINT SET- $27.99
EXTRA COLORS- $4.99 EACH X 6 $29.94
REDUCER-$3.99
CLEAR COAT- $5.98
TAPE- $2.98
HAIR DRYER- $5.99
SANDPAPER- $6.99
RUBBING ALCOHOL- $6.82
HELPING HANDS- $9.99
PRETZEL JUG- $7.99 & 5500 CALORIES
AIRBRUSH CLEANER- $9.99
PAINT BRUSHES- $7.99
BLANKS- $25.00
HOOKS- $5.99
SPLIT RINGS- $1.99
TOTAL $278.62