How to Make a Fishing Lure From a Wooden Paint Brush Handle
Making a lure from a paint brush handle – A work in progress
It’s no secret that fishing lures can be made from a variety of materials. Wood, plastic, & metal are just a few on the list. And within each of those materials, there is a list of sub-materials, if you will, that can be used.
There’s poly resin, soft plastic, PVC to start the plastic material list.
For wood, there’s balsa, pine, cedar, jelutong and a host of other types of tree-based materials.
When it comes to metal materials for lure making, there’s brass, copper, stainless steel, aluminum and many others.
So you can see that the list of possibilities when it comes to what to make a fishing lure from is pretty unlimited. It is, in fact, limited only by your imagination.
In this month’s blog post we’re going to show you how to make a wood lure from a regular, everyday 1 1/2 – 2 inch wooden paintbrush handle. Doing this will save you a ton of time when it comes to carving and shaping the lure body, since a large portion of the work has already been done at the paintbrush factory.
Creating and assembling this lure will require only some basic tools, which we’ll cover in the actual tutorial. We will also give you a link to a list of those tools at the end of this article, so you’ll know ahead of time exactly what tools you’ll need.
We will also be showing you how to foil your lure for a more natural, realistic look that will reflect light and catch the attention of the fish you’re after. Foiling sounds hard to a lot of people, but Paul Adams shows exactly how it’s done in the video below.
One of the cool things about using this method is that you don’t need a lathe to shape the lure and the amount of hand-shaping and sanding that’s needed is minimal. This saves you a lot of time and work, so you can focus more on the finish work and get out fishing with it more quickly 🙂
Finished paint brush handle fishing lure
The end result is a lure that sinks and can be worked at just about any depth, making it a very versatile lure for many species of fish. Once you’ve made your first one of these you can experiment with the weighting on any subsequent lures of this type that you make, to achieve different sink rates.
Don’t be afraid to use your imagination once you’ve gotten this lure-making method down. A few little tweaks here and there can give you very different results when it comes to the action of this lure.
In the video tutorial below, you’ll learn how to cut the handle off of the paint brush at the proper angle, mark the “lure body” for drilling and weighting, insert weights, screw eyes and other hardware, sand the body slightly and then prep it for foiling.
Paul will walk you through the foiling process, step by step, and then on to painting your lure and getting it ready to fish with.
So check your cupboards or closets and see if you might have an old wooden paint brush laying around that’s no longer of use. You might just be able to recycle it and make a great fishing lure from it!
Enjoy the video 🙂