2 Color Powder Paint Jig Head
Denny Tubbs works on authoritative jigheads in his barn workship, with a few of his creations on affectation in the foreground. submitted
If fly attached is like oil painting, this is like metal sculpture.
Art, but of a altered kind.
Where fly tiers actualize with aerial hackle, cilia and hooks abate than your fingernail, Denny Tubbs works with old window weights, wire, rubber, glitter, scents, hooks as continued as your deride and molds big and abundant abundant to drive nails. But he's not authoritative flies for the brand of trout and steelhead. He's into creating jig heads, elastic worms and crayfish, spinnerbaits and added hardware-heavy baits for bass, walleyes and panfish.
The reward, though, is the same.
“It's appealing accurate to bolt angle on article you've fabricated yourself as against to article you bought in the store,” said Tubbs, a Angle and Boat Commission beat specialist and longtime clash bass fisherman from Hempfield who's been authoritative lures for added than 30 years.
“And what I absolutely adulation is that you can do whatever you want. What you accomplish is wide-open to your imagination. You can try things. Some lures ability not consistently work, but you never know.”
The barn and basement branch makers of such lures represent a “very baby allotment of the fishing accouterment industry,” said Bill Barlow of Barlow's Accouterment in Richardson, Texas.
But they are widespread. Barlow was a chemist in 1968 aback he started authoritative artificial worms in his barn because he couldn't acquisition annihilation he absolutely admired in stores. Today, his aggregation sells lure-making food to anglers beyond the United States and as far abroad as South Africa, South America, China and Australia.
The attraction, afresh as now, is the same, he said.
“Every fisherman, myself included, is consistently attractive for that abracadabra lure. I'm not abiding any added there is any such thing,” Barlow said with a laugh.
“But the acumen I got into it — and the acumen why I anticipate best guys get into it — is that I could never acquisition the lures I capital in the sizes and colors I wanted. The alone band-aid to that was to accomplish it yourself.”
That's what drives Tubbs.
He's got totes abounding of molds. Into some he pours advance he's begin at atom sites like eBay and in food to accomplish jigheads in all shapes and sizes. Some get coated with crumb paint, some with vinyl. Others are airbrushed. He mixes angle sizes and colors, adds elastic skirts and fiberguards in assorted blush combinations and lengths and puts some on spinnerbait wires.
Other molds are for authoritative bendable artificial lures. He makes worms, crayfish, salamanders and animal baits, capricious the acerbity of the worms as he chooses, abacus colors, flakes and scents, from earthworm to garlic, as he pleases.
“When my girls were little they ‘helped' me accomplish some of my lures, and we concluded up with some appealing agrarian colors,” Tubbs said with a chuckle. “But accept it or not, some of them absolutely worked.”
Locally, there's some affirmation that absorption in the amusement is growing.
“For the longest time, it was appealing slow,” said Dan Janitor of Accouterment Unlimited in Jefferson Hills. “We had some molds that had been blind on the aback bank for years. But aloof about in the aftermost year and a half, absorption started acrimonious up again.”
Tubbs believes added anglers should accord it a try. It's a abundant algidity hobby, he said. He recommends starting with aloof a cast or two, such as one able of axis out jigs in assorted sizes, until you acquisition what you like. From there things will grow, as apparent by the abounding totes, shoeboxes and drawers abounding of lure-making food in his basement.
“I apparently accomplish 80 to 90 percent of my own being anymore,” Tubbs said. “That's a appealing accurate feeling.”
Bob Frye is a agents biographer for Trib Total Media. Reach him at bfrye@tribweb.com or via Twitter @bobfryeoutdoors.
