Wood and finish

The woods used

Surf plugs are turned from a short list of woods, and the list is short for a reason: a plug body has to be light enough to float with hardware hung on it, hard enough to hold a hook hanger under load, stable enough not to move with the seasons, and clean enough on the lathe to leave a surface that will take paint without filler.

• Northern white cedar is the classic body wood for floating swimmers and poppers. It is very light, it turns cleanly, and it is buoyant enough to carry ballast and still sit high.
• Alaska yellow cedar is denser and tougher, holds a crisp edge on a cut face, and takes hardware better. It is a common choice where a plug has to survive rocks.
• Basswood is uniform, cheap and very easy to turn, which makes it a first wood for many builders. It is soft, so it depends entirely on being properly sealed.
• Hard maple and yellow birch are the dense woods. They are used where a plug has to sink, resist a beating, or hold hardware in a thin body, which is why needlefish and many darters are made from them.

Density decides the plug

The single most useful thing to understand about plug building is that the same shape turned in two different woods is not the same lure. Density sets how high the body floats, how much lead it can carry before it stops floating at all, and how it behaves when water pushes on a lip or a face. A builder chooses the wood for the buoyancy the design needs, and then corrects the attitude with ballast.

The comparison that matters is with water, which weighs about 62 lb per cubic foot. Every wood in the table floats on its own, and by a wide margin. What sinks a plug is everything added to it: hooks, split rings, wire, paint, epoxy and lead. A needlefish in maple with two hooks and a lead slug is under water in a second, and a cedar swimmer of the same length with the same hardware still floats. That difference is designed, not accidental.

Through wire and screw eyes

There are two ways to attach hooks and a leader to a wooden body, and the difference decides what happens when a large fish is on.

Screw eyes

Eyes are threaded into the wood at the nose, the belly and the tail. The load is carried by the grip of a short thread in soft wood. It is quick, it is fine on small plugs and light tackle, and it is the first thing to fail once the wood around the thread has softened with age or water.

Through wire

A single length of stainless wire runs the whole length of the plug, from the nose loop to the tail loop, with the belly hanger formed on the same wire or on a second piece tied into it. The hooks are then attached to wire, not to wood. A through wired plug can be pulled apart only by breaking the wire, and the wire is chosen so that it is stronger than the line in front of it. For anything expected to meet a big fish this is the standard, and it is the first thing worth checking on a plug you do not know.

Wire diameter is chosen to suit the size of the plug, generally somewhere between about .045 in for small bodies and .062 in for heavy surf sizes. Heavier is not automatically better: an oversized wire needs a bigger hole, and the hole is where water gets in.

Ballast

Lead is set into a drilled cavity, usually in the belly or in the tail, and then covered. It does three jobs at once: it fixes how the plug sits at rest, it decides how the plug flies through the air, and it changes how hard the body resists the pressure of a lip or a face.

• Ballast near the tail makes a plug stand up at rest and fly tail first, which is the whole principle of the pencil popper.
• Ballast under the belly, forward of centre, keeps the head down and helps a lipped swimmer stay upright at slow speed.
• Too little ballast and a plug rolls over on its back; too much and it dies in the water and stops swimming at all.

Sealing, paint and clear coat

Sealing is the difference between a plug that lasts a season and a plug that lasts ten years. Bare wood takes on water through any pinhole, a scratch at a hook hanger, a crack along a lip slot, a chip on the nose. As it does, the plug gains weight, floats lower, swims flat and eventually stops working, usually without the angler noticing why.

The usual sequence, whatever the individual builder's preferences:

1. Turn and sand the body, then drill for wire and ballast.
2. Seal, by soaking or dipping in a penetrating sealer or a thinned epoxy, so the surface fibres are filled rather than just coated.
3. Prime, so that colour sits on an even base.
4. Paint.
5. Clear coat, commonly a two part epoxy or an automotive clear, which is the layer that actually takes the abuse.
6. Fit hardware last, and seal around anything that pierces the finish.

A plug that is already in service is maintained the same way in miniature. A chip down to bare wood is worth a drop of epoxy the same evening. A hairline crack around a lip slot is worth more attention than a scratch anywhere else, for the reasons set out on the metal lip swimmer entry.

Hardware and corrosion

Salt water attacks everything that is not stainless, and it attacks stainless slowly rather than not at all. Split rings, hooks and wire should all be stainless, and they should all be inspected rather than trusted.

• A rusted hook does not only fail, it bleeds rust into the finish around the hanger and the stain travels into the wood underneath.
• Split rings work harden and open. They are cheap; replace them on a schedule rather than after a loss.
• Rinse plugs in fresh water at the end of a trip and let them dry properly before they go back into a closed bag. A wet bag is a rust chamber.
• Store plugs in tubes or a bag with separate slots, not loose in a box, where hooks chew the paint off the plug next to them.

Telling if a plug has taken on water

Set the suspect plug in the water next to a known good one of the same model and watch how each sits at rest. The one that has soaked floats noticeably lower and comes back to the surface more slowly after a pull. A scale confirms it, but the water usually tells you first.