Why testing is important

[l.i.fish.in.vt]

the only way to test a plug is fish it,unless the plug comes in side ways or upside down,or is totally unfishable,you won't if it is a fish catcher unless you fish it.i always make at least a dozen of a plug to give to others to fish for feed back other than my own.if i hadn't done that i would never continued making a few of the plugs i make.

[Diggin Jiggin]

Its way too early to be testing. You gotta wait for a nice single digit day in january

Funny thing about your post is that 1 foot down is NOT a bad place to be...

[Back Beach]

Originally Posted by l.i.fish.in.vt

the only way to test a plug is fish it,unless the plug comes in side ways or upside down,or is totally unfishable,

Point taken...but...in this case I was trying to make sure the plugs did what I envisioned when I built them, thus the testing.

Had I not tested them I would have wound up with someting other than what I planned, at least with the surface swimmer. It may have still worked like you say, but in this case I wanted a surface plug which wouldn't have been the outcome had I not tested them and made changes to the weighting.

Another example:

If I made two "identical" surface swimmers, one out of pine and the other from AYC, the amount of weight required would be quite different for each plug. In my case the pine body needs at least .250 in the belly to achieve the same action as an unweighted AYC body of the exact same style. The pine rolls out with no belly weight, but the AYC stays down.

[numbskull]

I'm not sure catching fish is the ultimate test of a good plug (or design).

You can drive a nail with a piece of pipe, but that does not make it a "good" hammer. Likewise, I can catch fish on all sorts of crappy plugs laying around in my cellar, but don't use them because I have other stuff that does the job better.

Certainly catching fish is a necessary condition of a good plug, but it is not the only condition.

Test swimming your stuff gives you invaluable confidence your tool will work the way you want it to when you use it. Each time you get it right you learn something that lets you build better tools in the future.

Fishing plugs well is not a passive sport. You don't throw it out there, reel it in, and hope a fish bites. Rather, you assume the fish are out there and you need to solve the problem of getting them to eat a piece of wood. To solve a problem you need different tools that do different tasks, and you need to know how to use each tool for the task it was designed. No better way than building and testing your own stuff.