Lure dive blades, made easier

I was sitting around the house Saturday since waterfowl hunting sucks and all the ramps and parking spots to the river are snowed in and I can’t get to where the birds are in the river. So what does a bored waterfowl hunter do when he can’t go hunting? Dream of fishing and making lures!

I had been making my dive blade out of Plexiglas, but I was tracing them one at a time on the protective film. It was a real pain in the butt and leading to not always working out on each one. So, I got the idea to do the same thing I do with lures where I print templates that I can glue on to boards to make them easier to cut the blanks out with the band saw.

I had the dive blades made in AutoCAD already. I do this as I can make one lure that works and I can use the scaling in AutoCAD to resize the blades and lure templates to make smaller or larger lures. I made blocks of the blades and spaced them 1/32″ apart which seem right for the band saw blade, but was a too tight for me. I am going to change them to be 1/16″as when I cut out the 5″ blades it just about removed into the blade when sanding them up at the belt sander. I want a little more slop so I am not biting into my templates.

I wanted to be able to glue the templates on to the Plexiglas, but get them off easily after I was done. I went to the grocery store and picked up this glue stick that is “washable” so I could easily remove the templates once sanded.

So, I peeled the protective coating off of one side of the Plexiglas and cut out my strips of templates. I rubbed the glue stick on the back of them and stuck them onto the Plexiglas quickly as it dries pretty quick. Make sure you use plenty of glue also as the back need to be good and fairly thick.

Here is all the dive blades after being cut out and sanded on the belt sander. Notice the one on the bottom is peeling already as I probably did not use enough glue on it.

Here I dropped one dive blade into a large shot glass with a bit of water in it. I came back in 5 minutes and the template slipped right off the dive blade. I just had to rinse the blade under running water and rub with my fingers to remove the gummy feeling glue.

Two blades next to each other. One with the glued template and the one on the right that just got the 5 minute bath.

Enjoy!