I have been powder painting 1/16 and 1/8 oz jig heads for my very first time and its not quite as easy as it looks. Jamie at Simply Crappie fixed me up with some jigs and paint and I read a lot of threads then watched some videos and set about powder coating my jig heads. I used a sterno flame and eventually a heat gun to preheat my jigs. I do not have a fluid bed so I fluffed up the powder and swished the heads around in the paint. Fluffing the powder every four or five jigs. After I had about fifty of them made I used a toaster oven to bake them.

Challenge number one was cleaning out the hook eye after swishing them in the powder. What a chore this was. Some of them came out okay with only minimal cleaning needed and some of them came out fully coated. I was using a tooth pick and had little pieces of vinyl plugging the eyes and just generally being hard to remove. I would push the tooth pick through, spin it a couple of times, and pull it back. The vinyl would just build up in the eye. Eventually I got them all clean but what a chore. A couple of the jigs I let cool too much and the eye is simply closed up. A hook won't even pierce through to open the eye.

Challenge number two was after letting them bake in my toaster oven at 350 degrees for fifteen minutes many of them had stalagmites dripping off. Some of them were just deformed a little and some turned out pretty good. Also, some of the paint melted into the hook eye and this was near impossible to open. Took a hook to pierce through the paint. A pair of wiring side cutters made short work of the stalagmites.

Obviously I am applying too much powder to the jigs. What do I need to change to make this a much more successful evolution? Would a fluid bed help with this? Is the preheat too much / not enough? Would an oil lamp be a better choice for preheat? I'm pretty sure the jigs I used the heat gun on were better than those heated from the sterno. I have two kinds of powder paint, ProTec and Columbia, I can't say either of them performed better than the other.

Dan