"unconventional" or "new" lures - worth looking into?

[mainbutter]

With fall upon us, and winter on its tail, the prospect of planning next season is ever on my mind.

I'm not an ice fisherman, and hard water season always drives me crazy dreaming about casting lures and open water on warm sunny days.

I plan to remedy my cabin-fever-induced fishing-dreaming insanity by spending lots of time building homemade lures.

I've been doing it a bit for the past couple months now. Most of my success has come on easy-peasy homemade inline spinners, which brought in tons of salmon on a trip to visit the parents in Alaska. My wooden/expanded PVC lures haven't seen the water very much, they're still in the "prototyping" stage as I get more familiar with everything from carving and painting to how to place lips on cranks and weighting for neutral buoyancy etc.

The tricky part I'd love some input on is just where to go in preparation for next year? Obviously the hobby of lure crafting is so freaking huge and infinite in possibilities that I can't tackle the whole spectrum of it in a single winter, much less a single lifetime (well, we'll see, hehe)

I could keep building a few more spinners for trout, salmon, bass, and pike. I could build some big double blades for musky. I could make rapala-style crankbaits and paint them with my less-than-stellar artistic skills.

That would be all well and good, but I think my creative juices desire something a little less "mainstream".

My question to the musky fishermen here is whether or not I should focus on making musky lures.

My ideas at the moment are trying to chase down a good design for jointed swimbaits, similar in design to ones in this thread, but larger for muskies:

http://www.fishingminnesota.com/forum/ub..._pi#Post1942906

And what about soft plastic lures? I know that soft plastics are not traditional musky fair, but there has been more interest in them in the past few years.

Is it worth pouring the time and effort into lures that aren't exactly tested with muskies, or should I just stick with making smaller stuff for bass and pike (which will eat anything, of course), and leave designing musky lures for when I'm more accomplished and know a bit more about what I'm doing?

In addition, is it worth hours upon hours of throwing "untested" lures around for muskies, or do you guys find it better to just throw your confidence lures around? It's easy to stick to things that you know will catch fish, but then again, where would we be in the fishing world without innovation?

[50inchpig]

how much time do you want to spend screwing around with baits instead of fishing? some people like to tinker, if that's your goal then jump in and go for it.

find a unique bait that the fish like and you're good to go. don't avoid musky baits because you don't have the experience. you probably have more room for error with the bigger stuff, doesn't need to be as finely tuned as the smaller ones.

probably the best thing you can do is find a lake where it's not hard to get a little action, if you're in the metro they're all over the place.

what baits do you like to throw? it's probably easiest to put your personal touch on surface baits and crank baits, plastic tinkering could take years.

i was all into making them a few years back, it felt pretty cool to catch fish on my own baits, but after the first few it's not quite as special. i still make baits but usually don't think twice about catching fish on them vs. regular baits anymore. now i give most of them away because a guy only needs so many bucktails.

[mainbutter]

Well I have plenty of time to spend screwing around with baits instead of fishing, simply because I'm pretty much shorebound most of the time, and as much as I like shore fishing, I simply prefer to be in a boat.

As far as what I like to throw for muskies, well it's hard to turn down bulldawg/cowgirl/WTD rotations, especially since I don't have more than a handful of days targeting muskies under my belt.

Also senkos I've had more muskies chase or hit senkos this year than anything else (though they were all pre-season).. really makes me want to try out some whacky non-big-box-retail-store plastics. Then again, lots of those just seem gimicky.

I guess that's my real concern right now. I know gimicky stuff can actually be really productive on fish that aren't picky or tricky.. but when it comes to fish like muskies, I'm hesitant to try anything too different.