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Spoon Fishing Lure

30-60 min

Ages 11+

What Will You Make?

Among the most popular modern lures is the spoon — a concave metal oval with a hook at the back. Spoons dart and wobble as they’re pulled through the water, exciting game fish and enticing them to bite. This version is big enough for bass and pike; make a smaller one for pan fish.

What Will You Learn?

Few modern makers would invest the time and effort to wind their own line out of linen or carve a rod from wood. But making one’s own lure is an altogether different story. Lure making is straightforward, and just imagine the satisfaction — and bragging rights — that come from catching a trophy fish on a self-made lure.

Here we’ll learn to use tools like a rotary tool and drill to make a new fishing lure from an old, upcycled spoon.

Making a Spoon Lure

Cut the spoon

Use the hacksaw or cut-off wheel to remove the spoon’s handle or stem. Remove the burr from the cut using the grinder or rotary tool (easier), or sandpaper (harder). Sand the edge smooth.

Drill the spoon

Mark the locations for the 2 eye beads on the concave side of the lure. Clamp the spoon in a vise and use the steel center punch to make an indentation on your marks.

Next, drill a 1/16″ pilot hole for each eye bead. It can be difficult to drill through the spoon with a hand drill because the bit will tend to wobble. Take your time and apply minimal pressure while starting the hole. Change bits and enlarge these holes to 1/8″, then 3/8″.

Drill 1/16″ holes above and below each eye bead hole, for the attachment wire.

Drill 1/8″ holes at each end of the spoon, for attaching the hook and leader.

Assemble the lure

Seat the eye beads in the 3/8″ holes and fix them in place with the bead wire. Insert the wire through a bead and both of its 1/16″ holes, and then pull taut and tie off.

Attach #4 split rings to the hook hole and the leader hole.

Attach a #4 treble hook to the split ring in the hook hole.

Attach a #10 barrel swivel to the split ring in the leader hole.

Remember, the idea behind any successful lure is to make the fish think the lure is something good to eat. You can change the lure’s movement through the water by using a hammer to make it more or less concave, or by slightly bending the leading or trailing edge of the spoon. You also can add feathers or colors if you think it will make the lure more attractive.

You’re ready to catch some fish!

What Is Happening Here?

Dame Juliana Berners

Recreational fishing has been around for a long, long time. Ancient writers Plutarch, Plato, and Aristotle, to name a few, make references to this pastime. But the first real fishing guide, with instructions on how to make fishing tackle, was a straightforward little manual called A Treatyse of Fysshynge wyth an Angle, published in 1496. Perhaps a bit surprisingly, its author was an English nun.

Dame Juliana Berners, prioress of the Priory of St. Mary of Sopwell, was the Ernest Hemingway of her day — she wrote about outdoorsy, adventurous subjects. She’s best known for her DIY compendium on hunting, hawking (falconry), and emblazoning coats of arms, The Boke of Saint Albans, in which Fysshynge appears.

“Ye can not brynge a hoke into a fyssh mouth without a bayte,” she begins, and then goes on in 25 pages or so to concisely explain how to use hand tools (hamour, knyfe, and fyle, for example) to make rods, line, and fishing lures.

There’s little reliable information about Dame Juliana’s life, and a few modern fishing historians are skeptical she actually wrote the book. But plenty of others are convinced she did, and so to her belongs the title of Mother of Recreational Fishing. Her work has influenced every major fishing writer from Izaak Walton to Gadabout Gaddis.

How easy it is in our modern world to go fishing! Just visit a sporting goods store and head off to the lake. But preparing for a day of fishing was a complicated task in Dame Juliana’s day.

First, you had to make a telescoping rod. Dame Juliana recommends hiking into the woods, preferably between the holidays of Michaelmas and Candlemas, to cut a staff of hazel, willow, or ash. Soak it in a hot oven and straighten it, dry it for a month, burn out a tapering hole using a red-hot roasting spit, then fit a smaller hazel rod within the tapering hole.

Making fishing line was even harder: Yank hair from a white horse’s tail, weave it into a thin cord, and color it with dyes made from walnuts, soot, and ale. Thankfully, the section on how to make bobbers (floats) is quite simple, requiring only a cork and a quill.

Lure making, mostly tying flies, concludes Dame Juliana’s Treatyse. Her descriptions of 12 different artificial flies — yellow flies, stoneflies, wasps, and drake flies, to name a few — provided centuries of fisherfolk with excellent advice on making lures that actually caught fish.

Spoons were not known to Dame Juliana — fishing historians credit J.T. Buel of Castleton, Vt., with designing and crafting the first spoon lure in about 1820. Apocryphally, at least, Buel came up with the idea when he saw a large fish swallow a spoon he accidentally dropped into a lake.

What Is Next?

Get Creative

You have a great deal of latitude in choosing spoon size and shape, hook size, and so on. Mix and match supplies to see how you can create new lures. You may also want to use feathers, beads, cork, or other craft materials to make your lures.

The key to a successful lure is to mimic the motion of bait animals:

A jig is a weighted hook made to bounce or “jig” at the end of a fisherman’s line.
A plug is an irregularly moving lure in the shape of a small fish.
And a fly is a tied and feathered hook that alights at the water’s surface like a bug.

You may also want to learn more about fly tying, the art of making fishing lures from natural and man-made materials.

This project was first featured in Make: magazine in December 2014. The author is William Gurstelle. William Gurstelle is a contributing editor of Make: magazine. His new book, ReMaking History: Early Makers is now available.

Materials:

Parts

Spoon, stainless steel flatware
Glass beads, 3/8", red (2) or color of your choice
Steel bead wire, 24 gauge, 2' length
Split rings, size 4 (2)
Barrel swivel, size 10
Fishhook, treble, size 4

Tools

Hacksaw or rotary tool with abrasive cut-off wheel such as a Dremel
Center punch
Sandpaper, grinder, or rotary tool with grinding head
Drill press or hand drill
Vise
Drill bits: 1/16", 1/8", and 3/8"
Pliers, needlenose

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The National Core Arts Standards are a process that guides educators in providing a unified quality arts education for students in Pre-K through high school. These standards provide goals for Dance, Media Arts, Music, Theatre, and Visual Arts with cross-cutting anchors in Creating, Performing, Responding, and Connecting through art. The Anchor Standards include:

Generate and conceptualize artistic ideas and work.
Organize and develop artistic ideas and work.
Refine and complete artistic work.
Select, analyze, and interpret artistic work for presentation.
Develop and refine artistic techniques and work for presentation.
Convey meaning through the presentation of artistic work.
Perceive and analyze artistic work.
Interpret intent and meaning in artistic work.
Apply criteria to evaluate artistic work.
Synthesize and relate knowledge and personal experiences to make art.
Relate artistic ideas and works with societal, cultural, and historical context to deepen understanding.

Please visit the website for specific details on how each anchor applies to each discipline.

ISTE Standards (International Society for Technology in Education)

The ISTE Standards provide the competencies for learning, teaching and leading in the digital age, providing a comprehensive roadmap for the effective use of technology in schools worldwide.

1.1 Empowered Learner

Summary: Students leverage technology to take an active role in choosing, achieving, and demonstrating competency in their learning goals, informed by the learning sciences.
1.1.a Students articulate and set personal learning goals, develop strategies leveraging technology to achieve them and reflect on the learning process itself to improve learning outcomes.
1.1.b Students build networks and customize their learning environments in ways that support the learning process.
1.1.c Students use technology to seek feedback that informs and improves their practice and to demonstrate their learning in a variety of ways.
1.1.d Students understand the fundamental concepts of technology operations, demonstrate the ability to choose, use and troubleshoot current technologies and are able to transfer their knowledge to explore emerging technologies.

1.2 Digital Citizen

Summary: Students recognize the rights, responsibilities and opportunities of living, learning and working in an interconnected digital world, and they act and model in ways that are safe, legal and ethical.
1.2.a Students cultivate and manage their digital identity and reputation and are aware of the permanence of their actions in the digital world.
1.2.b Students engage in positive, safe, legal and ethical behavior when using technology, including social interactions online or when using networked devices.
1.2.c Students demonstrate an understanding of and respect for the rights and obligations of using and sharing intellectual property.
1.2.d Students manage their personal data to maintain digital privacy and security and are aware of data-collection technology used to track their navigation online.

1.3 Knowledge Constructor

Summary: Students critically curate a variety of resources using digital tools to construct knowledge, produce creative artifacts and make meaningful learning experiences for themselves and others.
1.3.a Students plan and employ effective research strategies to locate information and other resources for their intellectual or creative pursuits.
1.3.b Students evaluate the accuracy, perspective, credibility and relevance of information, media, data or other resources.
1.3.c Students curate information from digital resources using a variety of tools and methods to create collections of artifacts that demonstrate meaningful connections or conclusions.
1.3.d Students build knowledge by actively exploring real-world issues and problems, developing ideas and theories and pursuing answers and solutions.

1.4 Innovative Designer

Summary: Students use a variety of technologies within a design process to identify and solve problems by creating new, useful or imaginative solutions.
1.4.a Students know and use a deliberate design process for generating ideas, testing theories, creating innovative artifacts or solving authentic problems.
1.4.b Students select and use digital tools to plan and manage a design process that considers design constraints and calculated risks.
1.4.c Students develop, test and refine prototypes as part of a cyclical design process.
1.4.d Students exhibit a tolerance for ambiguity, perseverance and the capacity to work with open-ended problems.

1.5 Computational Thinker

Summary: Students develop and employ strategies for understanding and solving problems in ways that leverage the power of technological methods to develop and test solutions.
1.5.a Students formulate problem definitions suited for technology-assisted methods such as data analysis, abstract models and algorithmic thinking in exploring and finding solutions.
1.5.b Students collect data or identify relevant data sets, use digital tools to analyze them, and represent data in various ways to facilitate problem-solving and decision-making.
1.5.c Students break problems into component parts, extract key information, and develop descriptive models to understand complex systems or facilitate problem-solving.
1.5.d Students understand how automation works and use algorithmic thinking to develop a sequence of steps to create and test automated solutions.

NGSS MS.Engineering Design

The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) are K–12 science content standards.

MS-ETS1-1. Define the criteria and constraints of a design problem with sufficient precision to ensure a successful solution, taking into account relevant scientific principles and potential impacts on people and the natural environment that may limit possible solutions.
MS-ETS1-2. Evaluate competing design solutions using a systematic process to determine how well they meet the criteria and constraints of the problem.
MS-ETS1-3. Analyze data from tests to determine similarities and differences among several design solutions to identify the best characteristics of each that can be combined into a new solution to better meet the criteria for success.
MS-ETS1-4. Develop a model to generate data for iterative testing and modification of a proposed object, tool, or process such that an optimal design can be achieved.

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NGSS HS.Engineering Design