Custom Handmade Swimbaits
About Lil' Piggy Swimbaits
Lil' Piggy Swimbaits represents the journey of two brothers learning to build baits in pursuit of big bass. It's a long story of how we grew up fishing, why we started making our own fishing lures, and what eventually drew us to the world of swimbaits - but at the heart of it all our drive has always been a shared love for the outdoors and making lasting memories on the water.
We are fishermen first and builders second. Our aim in joining the two together: to fabricate baits which we have full confidence in to pursue, fool, and land that next personal best catch. After over ten years of developing our craft (literally) from the ground up, we have narrowed our focus to producing custom, handmade hard resin and soft plastic swimbaits to mimic a wide variety of forage species in our pursuit of trophy game fish.
Lil' Piggy Swimbaits was started in 2016 to mark the shift in our building strategy to target larger-than-average fish with larger-than-average lures. Designing, producing, and perfecting these swimbaits by hand is a laborious process. Each original bait master is hand carved from a block of wood using only simple carving tools and no (or very minimal) power tools. The master is then molded to enable repeatability between baits. Each duplicate bait poured is then processed, assembled, tested, tuned, painted, and finished by hand. We incorporate top-quality hardware and components into our baits to help ensure that trophy fish that are fooled into biting get hooked and stay pinned. We are constantly seeking to improve our selection of baits to meet needs on the water, sometimes taking months or even years to finalize any given design. All of our acquired skill, knowledge, and passion is packed into each and every bait that we make. The lessons learned, the successes achieved, and everything in between - it's all there. Now it's on the fish to determine if our efforts are up to the task.
Tight lines and thanks for visiting!
Our Story (Extended)
As young anglers, we had no idea what a swimbait even was. All we knew was that we liked to fish. Our grandparents lived on a small manmade lake, and we would go over to visit them maybe once or twice a week. Our favorite pastime: walking down the street together to the community dock to catch and release bluegill. Grandma would prepare sweet corn or chunks of hotdog to use as bait and Grandpa would tie a simple hook and length of fishing line to the ends of his old fishing rods for us to use. We would spend hours outside in the freezing cold or blazing sun - dunking bait for the schools of bluegill that were conditioned to come feed at our feet. The simplicity of it all was something that we never grew tired of and would later come to greatly appreciate.
Yet something bigger lurked in those waters. The elusive "black bass" or “big-mouth bass” as Grandpa called them would often emerge from the depths below, drawn by the commotion of feeding panfish. To target these green fish and give them the opportunity to take a shot at our bait, we devised a creative plan. Working as a team, one of us would lure all the bluegill away from the bass with one line while the other dropped a jumbo-sized piece of hotdog down to the bass. Surprisingly the bass were often curious enough to take a bite, and we caught many good fish this way. Our passion for bass fishing began to grow.
One day, we were trying our usual ploy of distracting the schools of bluegill with a piece of dummy bait while trying to catch a big bass on another. The piece of hotdog with a hook in it was slowly sinking down to the bass when one of the bluegill turned around and snatched it up. Our frustration with the bluegill stealing the choice piece of hotdog and getting itself hooked quickly turned to shock when the bass shot up and ate the bluegill instead. At first, we thought the bass might not have seen the bluegill and would spit it out after realizing the mistake. Instead, the bass continued to choke down the smaller fish, drew the line tight, and broke free. The discovery that bluegill made good big bass bait opened the floodgates of our imagination and led us to believe that maybe there were other, better ways to target these fish than dropping a chunk of hotdog on their nose.
We began our journey into bait making sometime around 2006. Digging through our grandpa’s old tacklebox one day, we found an old Hula popper and some dry flies. The popper we treated like gold and would rarely tie on for fear of losing it, but the dry flies we used to catch countless bass and bluegill alike. These flies caught so many fish, in fact, that they were soon diminished to bare hooks. With no more dry flies left to fish, we started tying our own with thread and craft feathers. The prospect of making fishing lures started mostly out of necessity but quickly evolved into a passion for catching fish on our own baits. There was just something extra special about landing fish on something that you designed in your head, made with your hands, and put the time in to fish with.
It didn’t take long for us to take on projects more complex than a dry fly. We soon branched out to shaping simple plugs from pieces of foam, old flip flops, sticks from the front yard, scrap wood, anything we could find really to imitate the "expensive" baits we would see at the local Walmart or sports store. We would sort through our family’s entire paperclip stash to lay claim to the longest, strongest ones for internal hardware. When it came to painting our baits, we would often use colored markers or “borrow” our sisters’ nail polish box to add a bit of flair. We named our work "Little Lunker Bass Lures" - alluding to the fact that a lunker caught from our home lake wasn't much to brag about anywhere else.
In 2009, our parents bought us a subscription to Bassmaster magazine for Christmas. These monthly issues played a big part in opening our eyes to the expansive world of bass fishing and the specific techniques used to catch these predator fish. We were amazed how there was a whole industry and even a fast-paced, professional tournament circuit built around bass fishing. The idea of actively “hunting” for big bass with specialized gear intrigued us, and we said goodbye to our "bait and wait" hotdog game. It became our goal to catch the biggest bass in the lake, and we started to fill our personal journals with detailed records of fish catches to familiarize ourselves with the fishery and identify any repeatable patterns. Our dad bought us cheap spinning rod and reel setups from Big 5 Sporting Goods to learn to cast, and we started catching some good fish using them to throw our homemade baits or torn soft plastics that we would find discarded on the community dock. We had caught the bass bug and there was no going back.
Our first notable exposure to swimbaits came upon receiving the December 2009 Bassmaster magazine issue containing an article titled "Double XL Bass Strategies". The cover page featured Mike Long from San Diego holding up two giant bass bigger than any we had ever seen before. Long's (supposed) weapon of choice for targeting these monster bass: big swimbaits. It shocked us to read how big bass were not only accustomed to hunt down bigger forage like bluegill, but how they also could become conditioned to wait in ambush for something as large as a freshly planted rainbow trout. We realized that there was a lot more to these predatory fish than we had thought and were fascinated by the idea of slinging giant baits to single out the biggest specimens in the lake - often sacrificing quantity for quality of bites. On top of having the potential for a bigger bite, the swimbaits themselves were truly impressive to behold. Designed with greater attention to detail than most mass produced factory baits and sporting ultra-realistic finishes that could fool even the average bystander into thinking it was the real thing, swimbaits were nothing less than works of art.
As our knowledge of bass fishing began to grow, so did our skills as anglers. Our dad purchased an old rowboat for us to fish from, opening up new areas of our little home lake to explore. We dove deep into throwing conventional tackle and saved up to purchase our first cheap baitcasting combo from Walmart. Crankbaits and senkos became staple fish catchers for us, but we were especially drawn to those "big" swimbaits that seemed to be taking the bass fishing world by storm. The first soft bodied swimbait that we owned was a four inch Castaic boot tail trout. Our first hard bodied swimbait was a Sebile Magic Swimmer 95.
The rarity and high price tags of some of the bigger custom swimbaits only added to their intrigue for us. There were only a few mainstream companies making mass produced swimbaits at the time, so almost everyone knew of the handful of pioneer garage builders and their work. Bait drops from said builders would sell out almost instantly, and the prices to acquire product second hand were often through the roof. As kids who thought a $4 Castaic trout was expensive, getting our hands on some of these desirable baits was out of the question. But what if we could make our own? Our homemade plugs proved very successful in catching fish, so it seemed almost natural for us to start cutting joints and producing our very first wooden swimbaits.
In 2014, we discovered the online forum Swimbait Nation and became members there. Swimbait Nation had a wealth of information regarding big bait fishing, and we learned a great deal by participating in discussions there. It was a great experience being a part of the niche and growing community revolving around throwing swimbaits for trophy bass. Sadly, Swimbait Nation unexpectedly shut down and we didn't know where else to go to find answers to our questions. It was early in 2015 through a Google search trying to find out what happened to Swimbait Nation when we stumbled upon Swimbait Underground. We soon became members there along with some familiar names from Swimbait Nation.
One of SU's biggest draws for us was the "Grass Roots" section where forum members could share their homemade baits and discuss the building process with other makers. Reading through different build threads and seeing the progression of other builders bringing a mere concept up to a functional, fish-catching piece of art was a big inspiration. We started small but gradually began to dabble in making the bigger swimbaits. Responses to our work such as "IT WILL SLAY! Some of the ugliest baits are the best!" encouraged us to keep going while also challenging us to improve with each new build. We soaked in the positive feedback and constructive criticism alike, learning from our mistakes and expanding on what we did well. To supplement our interactions with fellow makers on SU, we also joined other forums like Tackle Underground. There we learned about many of the bait making basics along with some new concepts such as pouring resin into silicone molds.
Sometime in early 2016 we had fully transitioned from making wooden baits to pouring duplicate resin versions. This was a big step for us because, despite the higher material costs and increased complexity in building a finished bait, it would allow us to put more effort into carving a new model knowing that if we lost a bait we could always pour a replacement. It was an investment that we were willing to make if we were going to get serious about producing baits that we would be proud and confident to fish with.
The name "Lil' Piggy Swimbaits" came about more as an inside joke than anything. Our resin baits were improving with each new design, and we decided that it was time to make a new name to capture both our shift in the building process and focus on producing swimbaits. It was one of our wildest dreams to one day be able to produce handmade baits that other anglers would recognize and count among those made by our bait making heroes, and we joked with each other that as builders we had the unique opportunity to name our baits anything that we wanted. We were doodling logo ideas on a scrap piece of paper when a simple sketch of a little pig stood out. We dubbed it "Lil' Piggy Swimbaits" as a silly spin off of our previous name "Little Lunker Bass Lures". Initially we both had a good laugh and dismissed the idea, but somehow the name stuck and Lil' Piggy Swimbaits was born.
Lil' Piggy Swimbaits represents our journey as anglers in pursuit of our next personal best using baits of our own design. It has taken us over a decade of hard work and perseverance to get to where we are at now, but it has been well worth the growing pains with nearly all of our biggest catches for main target species (and some surprise ones) having already been broken using our baits. We are very blessed to have had a strong group of family, friends, and fellow anglers who believed in our work and encouraged us to keep growing throughout the years; and we are beyond thankful for all the continued support which allows us to keep doing what we love: building baits in pursuit of big bass.
Tight lines and happy building,
Dan and Dave
