Setting up a stinger on Rubber Lures with wire

After the recent article detailing how to setup rubber lures with little more than braid and flurocarbon I thought I would do a quick post on how to set them up with wire if you are fishing waters that have significant numbers of pike or if you are fishing a water where wire is mandated. Personally speaking as long as the water has a low number of pike and you are vertical jigging, I dont see an issue fishing with out wire but for those places where there are loads of pike here is how you set up your lure with wire.

This in this article I will use the rather versatile Fox rubber pro shads as they are my favourite “big” rubber lure and do seem to catch almost anything. Indeed I have had several size able pike to them over the years ( note that the zander only started last year..)

Anyway lets assemble what we need:

You will notice that there is a lot of common kit from the other article however now we need to have crimps, wire and crimping pliers. The crimping pliers are one area where I would not try to save money. A good quality pair will be a joy to use and will produce the right crimp every time. A poor pair ( and I have had a few) will bruise hands and create weakened crimps. For the money it is not really worth it. Note also that as the size of the bait has increased so has the stinger treble and the jig head. It is critical to match these 2 with the size of the bait used else you will loose fish.

Next take a section of wire about 8 inches or so ( this is a 5 inch lure) and crimp a treble on one end:

Note that I have left a largish loop at the end connecting to the treble. This is to allow the hook to move about and not be locked into any strange angles when the lure is assembled.

Next take your jighead and place it in the bait :

Then take the section of wire that you have crimped the treble onto and work out where you want the treble to sit. Remember to take into account how much wire you want to stick out of the back of the lure to allow the treble to move freely on the loop. Once you have this length measured, trap the wire near the jig head and crimp into a loop so that you have a section of wire with a treble at one end and a crimped loop at the other.

Next take your baiting needle and feed it along the hook shank inside the rubber lure and through the body so that it pops  out of the rubber shad where you want the treble to lie ie :

Then using the latch on your baiting needle pull the loop you made above through the lure so that the free loop in the trace ( the one without a treble in it) exits the rubber shad at the jig head. It looks gruesome but I assure you that the rubber shad doesn’t mind 🙂

Then slip the loop over the ring on the jig head, As long as the loop is at the bottom of the ring and the snap link for the trace is above you will have no issues. You might need to massage the lure to get the hook to sit correctly but with a bit of practice it will look like this :

And there you have it a large shad set up with a wire trace for both pike and zander fishing. Please note that in addition to this wire trace you should also use a standard wire ( and not fluorocarbon) trace attached to your line as whilst most pike will be hooked in the outer jaws, sometimes they will “inhale” the bait and take it deep down. You have been warned.

Do you have any coments ? do you want to see more like this ? make a comment below or mail me