Crankbait Tuning Tutorial - Chapter One

Research shows crankbaits are the most popular bass fishing lure of all. Surveys say the average bass angler owns more crankbaits than any other lure.

But one in every four crankbaits will never work well. Two will only ever be average, and only one treasured crankbait in every four will entice most all your crankbait bites.

This doesn't apply only to bargain bin baits. Price is not a factor here. You will get lemons and lackluster performers in every bunch of high-dollar dolls too.

What is the biggest mistake I see crankbait anglers make? It is fishing with those two to three out of every four crankbaits that have little chance to succeed.

Over a season or two, say a guy buys twenty cranks. He never does too well with most of them, and he thinks crankbait fishing is overrated. Fact is, ten of those twenty lures are only ever average. Five are unadulterated duds. And the other five that have the best chance, he never tunes them to unlock their maximum potential. Maybe he doesn't know how to tune them or what to look for when tuning them? Soon, he takes up Internet poker as a hobby that is more fun than drowning his sorry lot of crankbaits. That's a sad story.

Like a garden, your crankbait patch needs to be pruned and groomed regularly. Lures that are not catching fish are dead wood. You need to weed them out so that more productive lures can replace them.

The process to separate good cranks from bad starts before you even take them out of the package. Actually, before you even buy them.

Inspect the troops lined up for display on the store shelf. When the sales associate is not looking, rummage through a rack of cranks to cherry pick the ones where the two body halves look glued together properly, with no mismatches on the seams. Look for a neat seam seal that did not need remedial sanding or smoothing on the seam. Accept no dips or indents in the plastic, no drips in the paint, no sags in the topcoat finish. Look at the hook hangers eyelets to ensure each was seated properly in the injection mold, that a hook eye isn't cockeyed. Make sure plastic flowed fully and formed properly around the sprue stem of each hanger. Sometimes the plastic leaves a hollow there, and you don't want that.

Some models of cranks, including most wood ones, are made with the diving lip glued in as a separate piece. On these, try to inspect both sides where the lip adjoins the body, to make sure the lip is not slightly set off to one side or another. Any abnormalities, no matter how slight, they are reasons to reject such crankbaits right from the start.

Now take the cranks that pass muster in your preliminary inspection and buy them. Next week, I will tell you how to test swim and tune them to maximize their potential.

Photo Caption: For every dozen cranks one randomly chooses, on average, three will excel, three will never work well and the other six will only ever be average. This doesn't apply only to the bargain bin baits. Price is not a factor here. You will get lemons in every bunch of high-dollar dolls too. Can you spot the dogs in this litter? How about the rare few treasures that will catch more fish than the others? Actually, those are trick questions. You have to test swim crankbaits when not fishing in order to see the differences between them. It is a motion thing - not something that can be seen when they're not moving. You'll need to develop a trained eye and experience to tell them apart.

Crankbait Tuning Tutorial - Chapter Two

There is no clear reason for it, but on average twenty-five percent of crankbaits may never catch fish well. Half of them may only be average fish catchers. The other top twenty-five percent of your crankbaits are going to catch most all of your fish.

Last week, we identified what to look for in a crankbait before you even open the package. Now let's put our cranks through step two, the test swim.

It's best to test swim cranks in a swimming pool. It takes your mind out of fishing and catching mode. There are no distractions, no couple of casts at that bush just to keep them honest. No running down the bank to chuck one at whatever made that huge swirl on the surface. A swimming pool provides the perfect clinical environment to test swim crankbaits.

The first test swim is simply to see if your cranks swim straight, and to attempt to tune them if they swim off to one side or the other. You are still in triage mode here. The test swim is to separate cranks into three piles:

1. Some cranks you pull out of the package are going to swim true just like that. No tuning required. These are rarities and will probably prove to be exceptional crankbaits. You can almost tell right away which ones are going to be great fish-catchers.
    
2. Most crankbaits require some tuning work. It seems the faster and easier a crankbait tunes - the better a fish-catcher it will be.
    
3. Some crankbaits behave very moody, meaning they need a lot of time and work to tune them. They're probably going to be vexing, moody and less productive fish-catchers too. You probably don't want to use these, surely not in that championship tournament.

If a crankbait runs off to the right or left, swim it two or three times to gauge how bad it is off. Now you need to hold it up, take time out to inspect it from varying angles. It could be one of the belly or tail hook hangers are off center. Try righting them first, if they look askew. Usually, you want these components to be straight. A misaligned belly or tail hook hanger usually will not throw a plastic crank too far off tune.  On wood cranks however, belly or tail screw eyes and even belly weights inserted off-center can be career-ending injuries for a wood crankbait.

There are times that adjusting the belly and hook hangers will bring a side-swimming crank back into compliance. So always attempt to align them first.

Most often, it proves to be the line tie eye that you need to bend to correct a side-swimmer. On cranks with diving lips, you bend the line tie eye to the opposite side of the list (deviant direction of swim). This is a tricky operation since you risk loosening the eye out of the plastic, and ruining the crankbait completely. So do it slowly and more with nudges and gentle squeezes than with hard twists using a needlenose pliers. The less times you have to bend the line tie eye, the better.

Photo caption: Some cranks you pull out of the package are going to swim true just like that. These are rarities and will probably prove to be exceptional crankbaits. The crankbait shown here swam perfect with no tuning required. So far, it has won several local team tournaments. Crankbaits like these will become your most valued lures, the revered warriors that have been torn and shredded by countless bass.

Crankbait Tuning Tutorial - Chapter Three

Make no mistake, this is grunt work. If you've been reading along, by now you realize that crankbait tuning takes time. It's not the glamorous side of fishing, but it is the homework (pool work) you need to do to be the best crankbaiter in town.

Now's the time to confirm that the split rings are strong enough and swing freely. Believe it or not, some good cranks still come with soft copper split rings that a strong fish can pull apart as easily as sun-warmed taffy. Who knows why? Bottom line, you may need to switch out weak split rings or otherwise make sure they swing freely. If the stock or replacement split rings do not swing freely, they will impair the crankbait action. Remove them in order to ream out the hook hanger hole. Carefully, slowly rotate the tip on an ice pick in the hole, thereby widening the inside eye diameter. Don't loosen the hook hanger out of its socket here. Now your split rings will swing merrily.

Although it is difficult to spot this, if there are rattles or moving weights inside the crankbait, try to ensure they all move, that errant glue has not gotten on any of the rattle balls or internal ballast. This is not as uncommon a manufacturing mishap as it sounds. In a batch of twelve rattling cranks I recently purchased, two of the twelve had the large single knocker ball glued upside the head. Needless to say, they did not rattle. They just rolled over and played dead. That's a bummer.

Carefully cup the hooks in your hand so you don't get stuck, but also so the split rings and hooks don't tinkle. Shake each crank one by one, listening closely to the rattles. If any crankbaits sound odd, hold them up to the light. Most often, rattles will appear as if a dark shadow-like spot inside. If any of the dark spots do not move, chances are, they are glued there.  You probably don't want to use these, surely not in that championship tournament.

So far, we've separated the good from the bad from the mediocre cranks:

1. THE GOOD. With a permanent black marker, put a dot on the noggin of the good ones to identify them. If you have two or three good ones the identical model and color, put one, two or three dots on each, so you can tell them apart, and thereby keep tabs on which one did or did not catch what. Otherwise, you will confuse the three of them over time. The dots do not need to be big, and usually blend into the paint scheme. If you fear the dots will wreck your color pattern, then dot them differently - on the tail, behind the gill or on the lip near the line tie eye. These are the cranks you will be using most, especially at crunch time. So it is vital to be able to tell one good crank from identical other good ones.
    
2. THE BAD. You probably don't want to use these. It's hard enough to catch bass on good well-tuned lures. It's almost impossible to catch fish on poor lures. This is the most difficult part for many guys, and if you are married, your wife will never understand this. A feeling of anxiety or apprehension often accompanied by depression comes in here. Most guys cannot buy a crankbait and then not use it. Can you?
    
3. THE MEDIOCRE. Half your cranks will fall in this category. They're not bad, yet they're not good either. Next week, in the final part of our crankbait tuning tutorial, we'll present ways to tune these mediocre cranks up a notch or two on the productivity scale.

Photo Caption: Look closely to see the black marks made between the eyes of these two identical baits in order to be able to identify and tell them apart. These baits tested better than and went on to catch more bass than ten of their otherise identical counterparts combined. We don't know why, but bass do.

Crankbait Tuning Tutorial - Chapter Four

If you've been reading along, and you've been tuning your crankbaits as we go, then you've marked and set aside the good ones from your test swim sessions. You've hopefully buried the bad ones out back, and let's do some hook work on the mediocre ones this week.

Trying different hook styles and sizes can bring out even better action in some crankbaits.

At first, crankbait hook alternatives sound uncomplicated since size 2, 4 or 6 treble hooks are really the only sizes suited to bass. Granted, there are some crankbaits with larger size 1 or 1/0 hooks and some with size smaller 8 trebles, but these are not in the mainstream.

It gets complicated when you realize there are a dozen different brands and multiple hook models within each brand that are all size 2, 4 or 6 - no two the same! Some have thicker or thinner wire diameter, longer or shorter hook shanks, round bends or turned-in bends.

As you become more adept at crankbait tuning, you will begin to see subtle differences in what one hook does to a crankbait's action versus another. A different hook model will never make a radical difference, but it can add that certain je n'ai sais quo that turns the fish catching ratio in your favor.

Experiment with hooks. There's a popular impression that a crankbait manufacturer painstakingly matches a crankbait to work best only with one certain specific set of factory-installed hooks. That's poppycock. True, sometimes a manufacturer nails the hooks, and you just can't find a better choice. But far more often, a wide range of different model hooks may be used, some of which produce better actions. So don't get hung up (pun there) on the hooks installed at the factory.

For most of the large type crankbaits that American pros throw for example, changing hooks wouldn't easily throw these big baits in or out or change the balance. A round bend versus a wider gap turned-in barb, longer versus shorter shank, thin versus thick wire gauge. All these nuances influence action, and you may see something you like in the action given by one hook configuration that doesn't seem to be there otherwise.

On some of the lighter or more delicately-balanced lures, particularly the tightly-engineered Japanese ones, you have a narrower range of hook options - but still room for experimentation. An issue here is many of the precision Japanese baits are calibrated to produce their best actions with trebles smaller than desired by an American bass angler. Upsizing trebles, one can run into trouble since traditionally trebles skip sizes from 6 to 4 to 2. At least one hook maker, Gamakatsu has filled in the "treble gap" by introducing sizes 3 and 5. These in-between sizes provide the serious crankbait tuner with even more options to uncover a winning hook configuration.
 
Photo Caption: For some obscure reason, many lipless rattling crankbaits come with factory-installed #4 belly and #6 tail hooks. Mistakenly, most anglers misconstrue this to mean this hook set works best. After all, if the  manufacturer installed them, there must be some bona fide reason. Bass, on the other hand hit these lures as good or better with a pair of #4 trebles, and many American pros stepup to a #2 belly and #4 tail hook, winning major events that way. Other things being equal (translate that as long as the bass still bite it), big up your hooks as much as possible. It is amazing how a bass can smack a bait festooned with hooks, and still not get stuck on them.

Crankbait Tuning Tutorial - Chapter Five

In this final chapter, let us talk about the high pressure stress test first. Once you've tuned your worthwhile cranks to swim well at more or less ordinary retrieve speeds and optimized their hook configurations, the final exam is to test swim them as fast as you can turn the reel handle. This is the final confirmation they are tuned and balanced to swim properly. Any cranks that squeaked by the earlier tests with barely passing grades, they will flunk out at this point.

On the other hand, those cranks that still exhibit straight, symmetrical side-to-side swimming action even under the high speed stress test, take them fishing with you. Leave the others behind.

Between trips, you need to re-swim, re-tune and re-evaluate the crankbaits that caught fish for you on your last trip. Catching many or even just a few bass on a crankbait can undo it. If it's undone, no matter how good it did last time, you may need to replace it. Most guys cannot get themselves to do that. It's really hard for the average guy to let go of a crankbait, especially one that caught him several dozen fine fish. Yet all good things must come to an end, including magical crankbaits.

There is nothing you can do to revive the productivity of undone lures. The only thing to do is to honor them. Hang them on the mantlepiece in the fishing den. Then break in new crankbaits - new top performers.

It takes a cold heart and a trained eye based on experience to tune new cranks and spot previously tuned cranks that have been ruined by fish. But that is how the game gets to be played at the highest level.

To sum up what we mean by tuning, it is carefully adjusting whatever can be adjusted - line tie eye, hook hangers eyes, hook sizes and styles so that a crankbait "swims better" than it did before. Some crankbaits will do this - "swim better" than others. Who knows why.

By "swimming better" we mean maximizing how much a lure's movement looks natural and alive while minimizing how much it looks mechanical and man-made. It's a motion thing - not something that can be seen when it's not moving. You have to test-swim it when not fishing in order to see this.

Once you understand how this good-average-bad phenomena we've been reading about applies to crankbaits, you will more easily be able to spot it it in all lure types - wood, hard plastic, buzzbaits, spinnerbaits, leadhead jigs, spoons - even ten plastic worms in a bag may have relatively better or worse chances for success than the others. Don't get hung up trying to get your money's worth out of underperforming lures. It is a waste of your time to fish them. Learn how to recognize and fish with the good ones. Realize when you've got a dog on the end of your line. It's not easy to spot them at first, but with a little experience, you can do it.

Photo Caption: This bedraggled crankbait looks deceptively ordinary, about as ordinary as Clark Kent. It has a Superman side that can't be seen in a photo. For six years, it has caught bass when its counterparts couldn't. These are the kinds of crankbaits you want to have your bag filled with. Lures that never go out of tune, that keep on catching, and finally do so well that you reserve a special place for them to be used only in case of emergencies, like when big fish are biting, or when you need that one kicker to propel your five fish limit over the top!