Tour of Mepps Fishing Lures Part 1

hi welcome today we're going to talk about the met spinner over here we have a large display board we actually do have over 4,000 different lers that we do make right here in the plant we do have a plant nice France and then this is the only plant in whole United States they will cover the countries of Europe we will cover the whole United States today we are actually going to talk about the b3 egg Leo squirrel tail gray a hot fire tiger so going through the whole plant we will actually talk about this one will show you a step at a time how that's actually made back in the was probably the 1950s maybe early 60s my dad's favorite spot to go trout fishing was on the Wolf River east of an eagle and he was out one day and came back to his car and there haven't be another young fisherman came in about the same time and my dad was proud of his catch so he had to show this kid what he had caught and he showed him his trout well then the kid opened up his grill and showed my dad what he had caught and his fish were bigger so my dad had quite a surprise there and when my dad asked the kid what he caught his fish on the boy showed him a MEPS Pinner that he had tied some squirrel tail onto the treble hook so that really was where the idea of putting a tail on the map spinner was born it really changed the history of meps at that point because fishermen felt they had to have a plane were plus a lure with a tail on it and it was quite an innovation at the time okay back in this area is what we call squirrel tail Department so we're actually going to work out your grey squirrel tail your frog squirrel tail and what we call the buck tail which is your deer tail so what we do when they come in we actually take when we put them in your wash machine in your dryer so we actually wash the tail and we dry them once we get that part done if we need to we will actually die in these different colors here so your buck tail can get died about five six different colors okay here's actually where we're actually going to do the tying process so we'll start out we're actually going to use your squirrel tail and your chicken feathers these are actually your white feathers off the neck the chicken will die at that red color so we actually work with a company and they'll actually come in a big strand like this the lady right here will actually take a couple at a time and she'll take them off in show time and place them onto her hawk once she gets the feathers tied on then we're actually going to take the squirrel hair which actually we're using the tips of the tail so actually go through and we break off the tip because the hair is longer here we'll use the longer hair on the bigger size hook this part we'll use on your smaller size hooks so right now she's actually tying your squirrel hair onto the hook right now when you put a tail on a lure it does a couple things one is you can add color to a lure and by adding color you can add contrast between the spinner blade itself and the color of the tail and it also creates kind of an indistinct image traveling through the water like movement a minnow for example when it swims through the water and its tail is is swimming back and forth rapidly it's probably not a very distinct image to a predator and I think adding a tail with all of the hair that flares out and compresses together and then it flares out again that adds that indistinct image that creates a strike response in a fish new products are extremely important in the fishing industry we look at it as we would like to come out with something new every year of course the original map spinner has been out since 1938 and fishing with spinners is not something new to fishing so a lot of times you've got a really struggle and spend a lot of time trying to find new twists and new things you can do with a spinner it's not always the easiest thing in the world but the main thing is having something that works and works efficiently enough to catch fish it's not uncommon to work on a lure for more than a year you may not be working on it full-time or steady but it'll encompass more than a year especially with testing in Wisconsin the water is a little hard at some times of the year so we need to use a the pool at the Super eight on occasion to continue that process but we'll probably have well over a thousand hours of prototypes and testing to any given lure that we have this is the first step in our painting process we first we put H on and in a white primer our white primer is put on so that when we put a fluorescent color on it makes a fluorescent colors pop we need to have a good durable base to get started this is our chartreuse topcoat this color added with green and orange makes for one heck of a good fishing color it's very popular and it's the start of our fire tiger painting process this is the third process in painting our hot fire tiger this is where we airbrush the hot orange as an accent color the fourth step in our painting process for the hot fire tiger is to paint the hot green accent color this is done by Melanie one of our master painters it's all hand airbrushed and every lure is a little bit different after our paint process is complete this is where we start to put our decoration on top of it it's called pad printing and when we start that the blade is painted when it gets done it's a finished product ready to be assembled you you

Channel: Sportsman Channel

Views: 30,296

Rating: 4.848485 out of 5

Keywords: Fishing Lure (Sports Equipment), Fishing (TV Genre), Sportsman Channel (TV Network), Mepps, Squirrel Tail Fly, Fly Fishing (Industry), Squirrel Tail, Antigo (City/Town/Village), Wisconsin (US State), Aglia, Tour, Factory

Id: omqvfxLZWyw

Length: 7min 44sec (464 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 18 2015