How They’re Made

It starts as a jug of white liquid

The raw material is plastisol: PVC resin suspended in a plasticizer. Cold, it looks and pours like thin cream. Opaque, white, nothing like a fishing lure. Heat is what turns it into plastic. Somewhere around 330 to 350°F the resin and plasticizer fuse, the white goes clear, and the whole pot thickens up like gravy on the stove.

Temperature is most of the job and both directions are bad. Undercooked plastic stays hazy and weak, and those are the baits that tear at the hook slot on the second fish. Overcooked plastic yellows at the edges and then scorches. Once a pot smells like burnt crayon and pool chemicals it’s finished, and it goes in the garbage rather than into a mould.

Yes, it smells

Hot plastisol gives off fumes, and there’s no version of this where it doesn’t. Pouring happens with the garage door up, a fan moving air out, and a respirator on. The pot never gets left unattended, because plastic that goes from perfect to smoking takes about ninety seconds to do it. If you ever see someone telling you to microwave plastisol in a kitchen with the windows shut, that’s bad advice from somebody who got lucky.

Colour is two drops and a lot of second-guessing

Colourants are stupidly concentrated. A couple of drops moves a two-cup pot. They come transparent and opaque, and that choice matters more than the colour name does. A transparent watermelon lets light through and looks alive in clear water. An opaque black and blue is a hard silhouette and nothing else, which is exactly what you want in stained water or after dark.

The rule that keeps you honest is that you can always go darker and you can never go back. So a colour gets built up a drop at a time, checked against the last batch, and adjusted. Green pumpkin, june bug, black and blue, watermelon red, ayu shad, smoke purple flake, they all start from the same clear pot.

Flake is the part most anglers haven’t thought about. Flake doesn’t dissolve, it’s suspended, and it sinks. Stir between every pour or the last baits out of a batch will carry noticeably more flake than the first ones. Flake also settles inside the cavity while the bait sets, so on an open-pour mould one face often ends up a touch flakier than the other. Sizes matter too: .015 hex reads as shimmer, .035 reads as individual sparks, and the same colour in the two sizes fishes like two different baits in dirty water.

Laminates are a five-second window

A two-tone bait is poured in two passes. First colour goes in, it skins over for a few seconds, then the second colour goes on top. Too early and the two bleed into each other and you get a muddy band instead of a line. Too late and they never properly fuse, which you find out on a hookset when the bait splits along the seam. The gap between those two mistakes is a handful of seconds, and it changes with room temperature.

The mould, and why one side of the bait is the open side

Hand-pouring uses an open aluminum mould. Gravity does the filling. The top face of the cavity is open to the air, which is why one side of a hand-poured bait is flat and slightly glassy and why there’s flash to deal with later.

The pour has to be one continuous motion. Hesitate halfway and you get a cold seam, a faint line where the second flow didn’t fuse into the first, and that’s precisely where the bait will break. Underfill and you get a short shot, usually a missing tail tip or a thin claw. Overfill and plastic spills across the face of the mould.

Mould temperature matters too. Cold aluminum on the first pour of the night chills the plastic on contact and gives you cloudy, slightly short baits. The first pour is usually a sacrifice while the mould comes up to temperature.

Cure, cool, and the day after

Plastic sets in about sixty to ninety seconds, but set is not the same as done. Pull a bait too early and it stretches permanently. A stretched stick worm never comes back. From there it’s either a water bath, which firms baits fast and leaves them a little glossier but needs proper drying so no water gets bagged, or a cooling rack, which takes longer and leaves them slightly softer.

Then they keep changing. Baits off-gas and firm up over the first day, which is why fresh pours sit before they get bagged. A bait bagged twenty minutes after pouring is genuinely not the same bait it will be tomorrow.

Trimming flash by hand

Every bait, one at a time, blade or scissors along the parting line. This is more of the total labour than the pouring is.

It’s not only cosmetic. Leave a ridge down one side of a paddle tail and the bait tracks off to that side on a steady retrieve. Cut too deep into a rib on a ribbed worm and you flatten the section that made it wobble in the first place. Flush, even, and no shortcuts, because a sloppy trim shows up as a bait that swims crooked and you’ll blame your line.

Salt and scent, without the sales pitch

Salt gets stirred into the pot, and what it does for certain is add weight. More salt means a faster and more horizontal fall, which is the whole point on a ned rig or a wacky-rigged stick. The trade is real: salt is abrasive, so a heavily salted bait tears sooner at the hook slot, and it’s hard on moulds over time.

You’ll hear that salt makes fish hold on longer. Plenty of good anglers believe that. I’m not going to tell you I’ve proven it. What I can tell you exactly is what it does to fall rate and durability, because those I can measure.

Scent goes in as an oil, and it also softens the bait slightly, so a scented pour and an unscented pour of the same colour won’t feel identical in your hand.

What’s actually different about a hand-poured bait

Injection moulding forces plastic into a closed mould under pressure. That gets you consistent density, tight tolerances, very thin appendages, and the ability to run harder plastic formulas that would never fill a mould on their own. It’s durable, uniform, and cheap at volume. There is nothing wrong with it.

Hand-pouring is gravity into an open mould, so the plastic has to be soft and flowing enough to fill the cavity by itself. That generally means a softer formula, and softer plastic starts moving at lower water speed. The tail on a hand-poured worm will quiver on a dead-slack fall or a dead-slow drag, where a firmer injected bait wants more speed before it loads up and works.

The trade is durability, and it’s not a small one. A softer bait tears sooner and you’ll get fewer fish out of each one before the hook slot blows out. Fishing largemouth in heavy cover, plan on re-rigging more often than you would with a hard injected bait.

So no, I’m not going to tell you hand-poured baits catch more fish. What I’ll tell you is that the plastic is softer, it moves at slower speeds, and it doesn’t last as long. Decide which of those matters for how you fish.

What varies batch to batch

What moves	Why	What you’ll notice
Shade	Colourant is measured in drops into a small pot	One bag of green pumpkin a shade browner than the last
Flake density	Flake settles in the pot as you work through a batch	Early baits slightly lighter on flake than late ones
Hardness	Softener ratio, cook temperature, how it cooled	A firmer or softer feel between batches
Weight	Cavities are filled by hand and by eye	A few tenths of a gram, which you feel as fall rate
Laminate line	Second colour is poured by eye, seconds apart	The colour split sitting a hair higher or lower
Finish marks	Every bait is trimmed by hand	A faint parting line or a small nub

None of that is the difference between getting bit and not getting bit. All of it is the cost of the thing being made by a person instead of a machine, and it’s why every colour gets rigged and dropped in a tank before it goes on the site.

If something shows up genuinely wrong, though, that’s different. A short shot, a bad seam, a bait that won’t sit straight on the hook, send me an email and I’ll replace it. That isn’t a policy somebody drafted, it’s just how this works when one person poured the bag.

Have a look at what’s in stock right now. It changes as batches come off the rack.