# A School of Blade Baits and 1 Black Sheep



## cadman (Jan 25, 2009)

Here is a bunch of Blade baits powder painted for a customer. He also wanted one with black bars to simulate a perch. He feels the perch one will get eaten first. All were done with (5) colors of powder paint on brass blanks. I thought they came out extremely well except for the bars on the perch colored one. For you powder paint guys, making bars on jigs with powder paint is nearly impossible. This is my first crack at it. I'm not to happy with the bars, but my customer loved it. I think the bars would look better air brushed on, but then that adds so much more work to the blade baits plus clearcoating, so I am looking for input from anyone that has done all of this with powder paint.


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## socdad (Jul 25, 2005)

Very nice work  

Ive tried stripes with mixed results. Best efforts came from holding the bait in a helping hands vise (harbor freight), placing a piece of card stock with slits cut out over the preheated bait and dusting powder paint from a salt shaker over the card stock  

Yours look good to me


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## Downriver Tackle (Jan 13, 2009)

I have a buddy that gets pretty descent detail with powder paint, but he has 3 different size guns. One is small for stripes and spots and still electrostatic. I know that the electrostatic feature can make a HUGE difference. It locks those particles where you spray them and you get much finer detail and almost no overspray look.


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## cadman (Jan 25, 2009)

socdad said:


> Very nice work
> 
> Ive tried stripes with mixed results. Best efforts came from holding the bait in a helping hands vise (harbor freight), placing a piece of card stock with slits cut out over the preheated bait and dusting powder paint from a salt shaker over the card stock
> 
> Yours look good to me


Thanks for the compliment. I use a comb. Also you are correct you need to be an octopus to hold all of this together and then put paint on. I use vise grips to hold the jig, then on top of that vise grips to hold the comb. In one hand a heat gun and the other hand powder paint. Yes it gets very tricky. But it does work. I wouldn't want to do a thousand of these though.



Downriver Tackle said:


> I have a buddy that gets pretty descent detail with powder paint, but he has 3 different size guns. One is small for stripes and spots and still electrostatic. I know that the electrostatic feature can make a HUGE difference. It locks those particles where you spray them and you get much finer detail and almost no overspray look.


You are absolutely correct. We have an electrostatic system at work, but that is for bigger items. The electrical charge does draw the powder to the piece and hold it there until it goes into the oven. The only drawback to that is that it wastes a lot of powder. But the process its really neat. I would like to get a really small version of that for the home.


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## All Eyes (Jul 28, 2004)

Those look great Cadman! I have powder coated some of my blades but found that the added thickness takes something away from the action. Even when I dusted them with a brush as you suggested it seems like they don't vibrate quite as well. Of course that's without using a flow bed so I'm guessing that's where my problem is. 
Using a hand file I took the color off of some of them down to bare metal (copper or brass) and the combo of powder coat colors and shiny metal coming through here and there look pretty cool.


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## "Big" mark the shark (Jan 21, 2010)

Man those are great it's hard to believe you can do that with powder paint.


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## cadman (Jan 25, 2009)

[quote="Big" mark the shark;1137605]Man those are great it's hard to believe you can do that with powder paint.[/quote]

Thanks for the compliment. I try to put out a good product. There are lot of things you can do with powder paint, however like anything else nothing is ever easy, yet it is attainable if you are persistant.


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