Fish to Death: Adding Salt to Plastisol to Make Soft Plastic Baits Sink

A salted slim-stick did the trick!

If you're totally googlepated and I have only seconds to get your attention, this is the point of this post-> To add salt to plastisol so that it is more uniformly mixed and doesn't clump, you...

Only grind the salt to the point where it is very fine grained salt, not like talcum powder or flour. It is far less likely to clump this way.
Like making real cocoa, mix a very small amount of the liquid plastisol in with the salt first to create a slurry. This helps a little, but doesn't alleviate the problem by itself.
Use a simple drill mounted mixer, like the 1/4" spade bit paperclip gizmo you see in the photo below. Don't blame me if you poke your eye out. It's just a beta version of a better tool that should be designed by you so you can blame yourself for whatever happens.
Keep your temp down as low as possible so the plastic maintains viscosity and doesn't allow the salt to settle as fast.
4 tablespoons (60 ml) of salt per 100 ml ( a little less than 4 oz for my American friends), gives a good standard sink rate on plastic stick baits that I have found very successful.

Increasing density to plastic baits can be done with salt or density additives. I am yet to work with the additives myself and although salt can change the colour of your bait drastically and make it firmer and less durable, it is popular. Along with scents, it may arguably add to the appeal of your offering and it is at least something natural to add to an otherwise totally unnatural material. That discussion and debate is for another post however.

Many salt clumps on the bottom :(

Lately, I've been working on improving some of my plastic bait making abilities and was doing alright until I started trying to add salt to some stick baits. I did look up enough to know that I would have to use a coffee grinder to make salt flour. After killing the first cheap grinder, I learned that powdering salt is a little tougher on the motor than coffee beans. I used non iodized pickling salt that was kosher too. I don't worry too much about upsetting people, but I really don't want to offend a fish!

Grind it Up

Knowing not to fill it up about half way and to stick with something a little tougher, like the Black and Decker version, has worked out much better. R.I.P. cheap grinder :(

Looks nice, but I don't think you should grind it this fine.

Pull Your Worm

Pardon me? If you pull an end of a plastic bait containing salt, you may see white marks form and actually feel the salt come out on your fingers. I have noticed that the salt that comes out of a commercial G.Y. bait, is a little coarser than the salt flour that was coming out of the ones I had made to this point.

G.Y. above, my original below with salt ground too much.

Less grinding has made the salt easier to work with and you're simply not wasting time and energy. I would also grind it fresh when you need it, as it cakes up, and that can just cause mixing problems again.

Mix it Up

So, done with the problems right? Nothing new ever goes that smoothly, so of course there was a little more frustration to work through. It seemed that no matter how I tried to approach it, there were little clumps of salt flour remaining in the plastisol. I tried the cocoa trick (where you slowly add and mix the liquid to the powder), adding it slowly to partially heated plastic in hopes that a thicker mix would allow the salt to be worked in better, regrinding the salt just before adding, and probably something else that I just can't remember. They just didn't work.

I guess if you were making huge batches of salted plastics, you could just use a drill mounted paint mixer, but I really wanted something that would work easily in a standard measuring cup. I remembered seeing a great video on painting plastics, by Lee Butz on YouTube, and that he used a handheld milk frother, to mix his airbrush paints.

By adding a little plastisol to the salt and then stirring until you have a paste, you can get the mix fairly free of lumps - it's more of a good start than a solution. I tried to use the frother when the plastic was thick with the salt and it's just a no-go on that.

After using the frother with adequate results only once, it died and that was it. This could be seen as a further setback, but it was too time consuming and weak for this task anyway. By all means use one if it works for you - it's safe, that's for sure.

Underpowered but made it eventually

OK, so now to replace the little frother device. I know it looks a little too improvised, but after taking the bite out of the end of a 1/4" spade bit with a file and sliding a large paper clip over the tip, I was back in business. I am not telling you to make this, I am saying it worked. It worked safely for me as I controlled the speed of the drill carefully to start and I never had any issues. Just like with any of this, you should be wearing eye protection.

I assume no responsibility for how you use this device.

The fine wire of the clip blends well in a standard cup.

Heat it Up

And as the last helpful hint from my experience so far, bring the temp down so the salt has better suspension time. If your plastic is hotter than it needs to be, the salt content will be inconsistent and probably heavier towards the end of your batch than the start. You will have to experiment a little to see how low you can go of course, but with stick baits there aren't any thin features on the bait that could cool and clog up your mold usually.

You can bring the temperature down a bit when you're not shooting baits with thin features like curly tails or craw claws.

No salt visible now :)

How Much Do I Add?

I found that adding 4 tablespoons (60 ml) of salt per 100 ml ( a little less than 4 oz), finally gave my baits the same drop as a 5 inch Senko. It seems like a lot and definitely changes the colour of the original recipe, but that's what it took. I think it puts it at just under 40% salt :) Adding half this amount gives you another presentation speed and versatility in shallow water or when you want to tease them a little more.

I was super dumb with the math on this originally, so some of you may not need the basic lesson that I had to give myself. After thinking that it was 60% salt, which seemed crazy to me, I realized that 100 ml salt mixed with 100 ml plastisol would only be 50% if the salt displaced all of it's volume.... So 60 ml out of a total of 160 ml is 37.5 %. Go ahead, make fun of me :D

Tree Hug Plug

While listening to Rob Snowhite's podcast of ICAST 2014, I heard about www.rebaits.org. Something to look in to and make sure we keep in mind, whether you have a recycling program like that or not.