Most of my bass fishing these days is finesse fishing with small lures and spinning rods and reels. It suits my old man body better than what I used in my tournament days. I first tried tiny child rigs three springs ago for my Lake Fork bass bed sight fishing, and was amazed at the results. I then tried them for my dock fishing here at Cedar Creek, and they were so much better than the shaky head jigs I’d been using that I quit fishing the shaky heads altogether. The other finesse bait I’m using a lot now is the Ned rig. I just started using them this last December. I’m still learning all the ins and outs of them, but they have also been an amazing bait.
For close to 50 years now, I’ve been making a lot of the lures I fish with, from jigs, spinnerbaits, and chatterbaits, to injecting the plastics I used for crappie and bass fishing. So it was a natural for me to start making the tail weights for the tiny child rigs and the jig heads for the Ned rigs. I was also making some of the plastic baits for the tiny child rigs at first, but found the Zman Elaztech baits to be so much better that I’m no longer making my own bass plastics. Besides being so soft and buoyant that they get great action, the Elaztech collapses so completely so easily that it interferes with a hookset so much less than any plastic that you just don’t lose many fish, even using smaller hooks. When I was making some of my own plastic baits for the tiny child rigs, I ended up using EWG hooks with them, to get a better hookup rate, but they still didn’t hold fish as well as smaller hooks on the Elaztech baits, plus got torn up so much faster. Bed fishing at Lake Fork is a great way to test baits, and clearly showed the Elaztech to be better. I’m still injecting crappie plastic, but all of my tiny child rig plastics are now Elaztech. So when I started fishing Ned rigs, it was a natural to just use Elaztech baits on them too. I’m mostly using the smaller Finesse TRD’s on the Ned rigs, and the bigger Big TRD’s on the tiny child rigs.
Making tail weights for the tiny child rigs and jig heads for the Ned rigs both ended up being much more challenging than I would have thought. I visited the Texas Fishing Forum lure making sub forum under the bass section, to see what others might be doing, but was surprised to find nothing on either the jigs or tail weights there. I already knew that pretty much no one at Lake Fork was using these baits for sight fishing beds, and have enjoyed going right behind other boats and catching so many bedding bass that wouldn’t bite their bigger ugly baits, but I was certain that with all the good bass anglers on TFF, there would be some discussing these finesse baits. I was wrong. Either no one else around here is using them, or they just aren’t talking about them. I finally seem to be past the major challenges and settled in on both the tail weights and jig heads I’m making now, so thought I would post about them here.
With the tiny child rigs, I quickly found that I liked the VMC half moon weights best, and bought the Do-It mold to make them. Do-It calls that mold Worm Nose sinkers. With mushroom head weights that only had a thin wire keeper, they wanted to fall out of the baits, and tail weights that insert completely into the bait just don’t give you as much weight right on the end of the bait, so didn’t seem as good as the half moon weights, when it comes to making the bait stand up. The biggest challenge with the half moon tail weights is inserting them into the TRD. If you just try pushing them in up to the mushroom head, they simply spring back out, having not even penetrated the bait. I ended up sharpening two different size small Phillips screwdrivers to use. I wet the smaller one and push it into the end of the TRD, further than I will insert the tail weight, then do the same thing with the larger screwdriver. I leave that bigger screwdriver in the bait while I’m putting super glue on the weight and getting it ready. As soon as I remove the screwdriver, I immediately insert the tail weight. This method works very well. But it’s enough trouble that I usually glue a few into TRD’s at home, ahead of my fishing trips. But that caused its own problems. More on that below.
While I really liked these half moon tail weights, getting a homemade version of them proved tougher than I thought. For years, I’d been using a bismuth-tin alloy for all my crappie jigs, and that worked well until I changed from regular jig heads to heads with a collar. Collar jigs would break at the collar. So did the tail weights, but they also had another problem. While lead shrinks as it cools, bismuth does the opposite, it expands. So with molds than have flat edges, such as the back face of a mushroom head or some barbs on a collar, bismuth can expand enough to wedge the lure into the mold, and you can’t get it out. This was a major problem with the tail weights. I could only get about one of every five out of the mold without breaking it, and then when I fished with them, just a bass shaking its head could break them.
I hadn’t poured lead in many years, but I had an second unused Lee melting pot, so I bought lead and tried using it. Lead ended up having its own set of problems for my needs. It appeared to make great tail weights. But it turns out that salt filled baits, like the TRD’s I was using, eat lead. It’s such a chore to get a half moon weight inserted into a TRD that I always inserted some ahead of time at home. But within a few weeks, the salt in the TRD’s would have eaten the barbs right off the weight. And even before that happened, there would be so much corrosion between the weight and the TRD that the weight would just fall out. By the time I discovered that, I had already started using an alloy, 50 percent lead, 40 percent bismuth, and 10 percent tin for my crappie jigs. That worked very well for them. It’s a lot tougher than the bismuth/tin alloy, and the collars on the crappie jigs didn’t break any more. But it still didn’t work well for the tail weights. Like the bismuth, it was still really tough to remove from the mold, and still corroded, but quite a bit slower, when left in the TRD’s. It occurred to me that I had another metal I could try for the tail weights: tin.
If you price tin, you’ll find it to be outrageously expensive, at over $30 a pound. But I already had plenty. Besides using it to alloy with bismuth, I’d made reusable spit shots with it years ago. The tin worked great in the tail weight mold. It removed easily and after several weeks in the TRD’s, shows no signs of corrosion. Tin isn’t completely impervious to corrosion from salt, but it obviously happens at a much slower rate than lead. But tin is only around 60% as heavy as lead. So I weighed the lead alloy tail weights before I tried tin. The weights from the 1/16th oz cavity in the mold weighed .080 oz. I was surprised at that. 1/16th of an oz is .0625 oz, and this was lead alloy, which should have been somewhat lighter than lead. Obviously, the mold makes heavier weights than advertised. I poured 1/16 oz and 1/8 oz weights with the tin. The 1/8 oz cavity made weights which weighed .083 oz. That’s just .003 oz more than what I had been using, so I’m now using those for the Big TRD’s. The 1/16 oz cavity made weights which weighed .054 oz. I’m going to keep a few of those around too, and use them when I occasionally fish with a Finesse TRD rigged as a tiny child rig.
A Big TRD with tail weight, the tail weight I’m making for it, and the screwdrivers I use to insert it.

When I started making jigs for the Ned rigs, I tried several different ones, including the Do-It Finesse Jigs. I ended up liking the ones from the Do-It Worm Nose mold the best. These are just like the old Gopher Mushroom Head jigs preferred by many midwest finesse anglers. The only problem with this mold is that the smallest cavity makes a 3/32 oz jig, and I want a 1/16 oz jig. I decided I could solve that by just grinding enough off the nose to take it down to 1/16 oz. I started out using pure lead for these, but ran into the same problem I had with tiny jigs on bass size hooks in my shaky head jig making: a tiny lead head on a bass size hook ends up with a loose hook/keeper/spring or whatever. I next tried the lead/bismuth/tin alloy, but once again, had trouble getting the jig out of the mold. I ended up with the same solution as I did with the tail weights, namely tin.
When I tried pouring the worm nose jigs with tin, it poured perfectly, and I got a jig from the 3/32 oz cavity that weighed from .057 oz to .059 oz. That’s barely under the 1/16 oz I wanted, so these jigs are perfect. An added benefit is that I can now use powder paint to paint the jig heads. When I had tried that with the lead alloy version of these jigs, I found that the alloy melted off the hook at a lower temp than the powder paint needed. But tin melts at 449 degrees, quite a bit higher than the powder paint, so I’ve started painting these jigs now, as well as the mushroom head on the tail weights. I ended up liking the size 1 Owner 5313 hooks best. These hooks are made of a bit heavier wire than thin wire hooks, but still fit the Worm Nose mold. And they are shorter than most size 1 hooks, even shorter than the size 2 Mustad hooks I had tried. I think that helps a lot in a small bait like a Finesse TRD. Too many anglers use jigs with hooks so big that they diminish the action of the TRD’s. The size 1 Owners are strong enough to not bend easily at all, hold even bigger bass very well, but are small enough to work perfectly with these tiny finesse jigs. I’ll continue to use the lead alloy for my crappie jigs, but it’s really nice to be using something as non-toxic as tin for all my bass fishing jigs and weights. Here are some pics of what I’m making now.
A Finesse TRD with my new jig.

The finesse jigs and tail weights I’m making now.

That last jig is a hover jig, made from a Do-It Hover Jig mold. I really haven’t tested it much yet; I didn’t get the mold until the dead of winter. It inserts completely into a minnow type bait. You insert it 1/4″ to 3/8″ from the front of the bait, then coax the nose of the jig into the bait too, and add a drop of super glue to hold it. These style jigs are becoming very popular with tournament anglers to fish for suspended bass they’ve found using forward facing sonar. I don’t have FFS, but think there will be situations where these jigs suit me well. They put the weight further back in the bait, and so help keep the bait always horizontal, rather than moving nose down like most jigs do. That’s a more natural presentation for a really slow moving bait. Abd the weight being further back also causes a more erratic and more sideways movement when you twitch the bait.
The pic below shows a bait with the hover jig right below the same bait with a mushroom head jig.

I don’t know if anyone at TFF will have any interest in making these for themselves, but I’m going to put a link to this blog entry for anyone who might.