Full transcript of “DIY Antenna Float for Lift Method Fishing”. Click a timestamp to open the video at that moment. Need another video? Use the YouTube transcript generator.
0:00 hi folks and welcome back to fishing with den so last week i did a video on the lift method of float fishing and if you haven't seen the video i'll put a link just up here um so you can have a quick look at that one first of all but basically all the lift method is is a float a bit like this which sits down as usual to about there in the water and when you get a bite the bite indicates by doing this lifts right up the lift method and the way that does it is simply because you have a small shot just about that far from the hook and then when the fish picks up the bait the whole thing rises up and you get exactly what i just showed you
0:46 which is the lift now you do need floats for some fairly thin antennas like the one i've made here and quite a few people have asked me how to make it so obviously there's a few people out there that want to give it a go so today's video is going to be exactly that how to make one of these uh floats for using on lift bites it's also called an antenna float sometimes called a wind beater but basically this is all it is now my versions i've made in the usual way so they come apart and i can change the tips on them as you see to different colors if you just want to make them so that this antenna just goes straight into the float without having the ability to change it that's fine you probably just need to make a few more floats with different
1:33 tip colors materials wise you're going to need some of this 12 millimeter round bolster wood or half inch round bolster wood that's for these bodies of the floats five millimeter round bolster wood which is for the tips you're going to need to get some of this fiberglass material and basically these are reclaimed from broken floats uh pole floats these are the um the stem sections where i've just literally taken off the old floats and reusing them that forms the antenna you'll need a package of these bamboo skewers for barbecues these are the ones which are about two millimeters in diameter and if you're going to make
2:19 the ones with the removable tips and changeable tips you're going to need to get your hands on some of these these are pastel gel pens and what you're going to need to do is to take the insides out remove the metal nib part there and then run it under a tap until you end up with just the hollow tube and that's what takes part of these bamboo skewers and also forms the uh the peg in the bottom and that's pretty much all you're going to need for this apart from some paint obviously so i think the next thing is let's get on with actually making them for you the floats i'm going to make today are going to be two
3:05 aaa's three triple a's and four triple a's and so to do that i've cut these pieces of balsa at 30 millimeters 40 millimeters and 50 millimeters in length now you can do that with a craft knife or a hacksaw in my case i'm i'm lucky i've got a bandsaw so that's what i've cut them on the next thing we have to do is to drill holes through the center of the bodies now i'm lucky because i've got this homemade float lathe which i made up of course you won't have one of these so in one of my previous videos on float making i actually did show you how to use a standard battery operated drill screwdriver which is clamped to the desk and you can use that to drill the holes and you can also use it to shape them
3:50 later i'll just insert that video for you now it's only sort of a minute or two long but that should help you to get the holes straight all the way through and it'll also help you to to shape the floats as i say later on if you've already seen this video on the um the battery screwdriver because you've made other floats feel free to move on to the the next section of making these floats and that's at this point here so the first thing is don't just take a standard battery operated screwdriver put a two millimeter drill bit in it and then try and drill through the center you will actually end up doing this and it'll come out off center at the other end the idea is to try and secure this down to the bench
4:35 somehow now i found the easiest way to secure the battery operated drill screwdriver is just to take a clamp and clamp it in a position so it's parallel to the bench here take off the the battery pack for now and then you'll be putting on either tape or a cable tire something to hold the trigger in position then when you put this back on it'll start up now as you can see i've also taken a couple of pieces of scrap wood so they're just fractionally lower than halfway what i'm going to do is offer that up now obviously i'm doing this all backwards here but the point of the drill goes into the center and now i can actually gauge roughly where i am in terms of keeping
5:21 this parallel so i can take it into the drill and take it back the other way and drill from the other side never try and drill all the way through because that's going to mean it comes out slightly offset here obviously this is just a piece of scrap but really this will give you quite a good result so
6:09 as you would have noticed when i was drilling even with this small one i drilled one end first went about halfway through and then turned it around and went the other way and as i said in the previous segment always do that that way you'll get centralized holes through all of your pieces if you don't want to have interchangeable tips like i've got then what you need to do is to only drill the hole from one end go about halfway through and take this antenna section find the center and just push it in and then glue it in place obviously that means it's fixed but it's an easier and simpler way to do it than my way um of course the benefit of mine is i can change tip colors easily and also lengths if i need to but
6:56 if you don't want to go to that length feel free to just as i say put this straight into the the body of the float itself if you are going to do the same things i do and use the interchangeable tips you're now going to need this plastic inner tube from the ballpoint pens these are the ones we emptied out of ink earlier on now the outside of these is really smooth and it doesn't take uh glue very well at all so before we start cutting them up just to take a piece of 80 grit paper sandpaper and just rough up the edges all the way around you'll know when it's right because instead of being a nice shiny finish you've got a really dull sheen all the way around you don't have to go mad on this it's literally just enough to take that shiny surface
7:42 away and make sure the glue sticks to it that's it i'm going to cut the tube into one inch or 25 millimeter sections it doesn't have to be totally exact just use a craft knife and roll it backwards and forwards until it goes through this down the tube until you've got enough sections for the amount of floats you're going to make now take one of the two millimeter barbecue skewers use the blunt end not the sharp end take one of those sections of plastic tube
8:27 and insert it into it and that's actually a little bit tight so if you need to just take the 80 grit sandpaper and just give it a quick rub down again not too much just enough to make it a sliding sort of a fit inside like that and the final operation on this section is to just cut off the skewers at about 50 millimeters again you can just roll it backwards and forwards don't even have to go all the way through on this one you can just break them off like that these will become shorter eventually but if you make them about 50 millimeters long for now that'll help you when you come to do shaping
9:14 so before we glue all these parts into the body of the float itself we have to glue the bamboo skewer into the plastic tube and exactly with the outside we have to rough up the tube but of course you can't do that with sandpaper on the inside so this is just a simple safety pin i bent over the end and all you do is insert it probably or a good 10 or 12 millimeters inside and then just twist and pull backwards and you're scoring the inside of the plastic tube as you go as you see here hopefully you can actually see the scoring i'll try and see if we can get this a bit closer for you but you see the scoring on that
10:00 that just provides the key so that when we glue this inside of here it will actually stay in there i've mixed up some two-part epoxy this is that quick drying stuff it's supposed to be about five minutes but trust me when it's warm it goes off a lot quicker make sure you get some on the end of your skewer and just push it in to about the halfway point don't go any further than that otherwise you won't be able to get your antenna in just wipe off any excess glue and do that for each of them make sure you've got plenty on the end there because you want that to be waterproof as well just in case just wipe off again
10:46 now it's time for a quick cup of coffee while i leave those to dry i've given it about 20 minutes while i had a cup of coffee and so the glue's dried on these items here as you can see these go through the body of the float and come out of the bottom now on the bigger floats we don't have to have much if anything sticking out but on the smaller bodies as you see from this small one here we have to have a little bit sticking out otherwise that 25 millimeter length is going to come all the way down here so just be aware of that when you're inserting to insert it we have to drill a four millimeter hole into um the top of the um the body and we'll do that again in my case on the float lathe
11:32 i've put the four millimeter bit in and i'm just going to put a piece of tape on just at the approximately the 25 millimeter point to indicate that i should go no deeper than that on any of these drillings uh bear in mind as i said before if i'm drilling this small one which is only this long i don't want to go all the way in so i'll probably only go to about there so that's mine done again you can do the same thing on the
12:18 drill screwdriver mechanism i showed you earlier on just make sure that you keep everything as straight and parallel as possible you don't want anything to be slightly off when you finish the float now we've got the four millimeter holes drilled we can just take a long skewer out of the packet and just go through and just push out any residual sort of bits and pieces and also at this point you need to make sure you've got a reasonably sliding fit if it's tight like this just take the piece of 80 grit sandpaper and just give it a bit of a rub like this until you've just got a fairly smooth fit just check it through the small hole first of all and that now goes in quite
13:04 smoothly and on this one through the holes and in it goes i'm not going to push it all the way in at this point because i've actually still got a little bit of curing time on the the glue so i'm going to pull it out from this end but i am now going to glue each of these three into the bodies same as before with the glue then i've mixed up a small amount of the araldite epoxy and i'm going to use the bbq skewer just to smear some on just a reasonable way down the stick and also onto the plastic tube
13:52 take it in through the end the four millimeter end obviously and just push seems to me about it and just get a piece of tissue just to wipe it off it's always a good idea to wipe this off because when you're trying to shape the body it uh tends to make it difficult to do if it's got if it's got glue on this end you'll notice i didn't put glue all the way down here and this is now clear so that's that one done i'll just finish the other two off and then we'll get on with shaping the shaping of the body is all going to be done on my float lathe here
14:39 but i've also just sanded down the end of one of these longer skewers to it insert it in there then when i put it in the chuck when i turn this on this can rotate and sometimes it wobbles so if you've got this extra piece in here you can steady it with your hand like this again it isn't too bad but it does kind of wobble a bit if you do that but this settings it down quite nicely [Music] to get the shape i'm just going to use again the same 80 grit sandpaper and i'm going to go with a shape which is pretty much exactly the same as this
15:24 one and that's the first body complete uh except for just using a piece of this 400 grit emery cloth just to smooth things down a bit
16:18 so that's the body's all complete except for the part where i have to just trim off these ends which i'll do now with a craft knife on these ones i tend to leave oh i don't know probably 15 millimeters i suppose not totally critical you're going to be putting a float adapter on here just score through break them off and then just use the 80 grit sandpaper just to round the ends so nothing sticks i'll finish these other two and then we'll get onto the antenna
17:03 as i explained right back in the beginning of this video this is um some fiberglass stem material which came from some broken pole floats i've cut it off to be about 110 millimeters long and obviously i'm not going to be able to fit this in here like this because it's just too small and you'll remember back on the ones i made i've built that up to accommodate now we have done that is to take a piece of paper which is 15 millimeters wide and if i can get this off there we go and about 25 millimeters long i've just used some super glue
17:49 put a dab of it on the end and then held it in place while it dried be very careful that you don't glue your fingers together on this one what i'm then going to do is take some pva wood glue and just fold this around on itself like that and wait for it to dry and then after that i can either build it up or sand it down depending on what i need to do to make it fit i'm going to use some waterproof pva wood glue which i happen to have lying around from other projects and i'm just going to spread it on liberally allow it to soak in and also give it a bit of a whizz around and then
18:34 just twist everything up as i explained before a little bit messy but not too bad try and keep everything going around nice and straight and wipe off any excess bit of folding in make sure it's nicely together and now we just have to wait for it to to dry once it is dry we can either sand it or we can paint it depending on whether we have to build it up a little or take it down a little i've had to wait a short time whilst the pva glue dried on this built up area when i came to try it out on one of
19:20 these floats i'd already made i found that it's actually it's an okay fit but it's quite a stiff uh fit and i want a looser fit so what i've done on the other one i built is i've just taken the 80 grit sandpaper and just literally smoothed it down a little bit so it's a sliding fit not too sloppy but sliding and then i just just smoothed it down a little bit more with the 400 grit emery cloth and that's just about good to go so i'll do the same on this one and then we'll put the tips on the tips of these floats are made from the five millimeter bolts of dowel and they're about 20 millimeters long i've just made a mark in the end there
20:05 so i can get to a center point but all you need to do is using the table as a guide gently push it in about halfway and then just twirl it around and see what happens now you can see that's slightly off so you do get a bit of leeway on this you can maneuver it around there we go that's pretty much it maybe a little bit more fine tuning but uh we'll just glue that on shape it up and then we're ready for painting and here's the final antenna product i glued the the tip on using uh the epoxy again because that gives you time to maneuver it a little get it nice and straight
20:52 if you use super glue that tends to just go off and you're stuck with whatever you've got then i just put it onto the float lathe and just shaped it up in exactly the same way as i showed you previously so now we've got everything ready we've got the floats or the float bodies and all i've done is i've taken three bits of the bbq skewers and shoved them into the plastic inserts it just makes it easier just to paint them because i'm going to use spray paint i might as well do these of course at the same time so this time i'm going to use this dulux spray paint um duramax semi-gloss enamel apparently it's good for wood metal and plastic um unfortunately the stuff i used to use appears to have been discontinued
21:37 i did try on another project some really cheap spray paint but trust me you probably want to buy this uh more expensive stuff it does actually go on better and doesn't drip anywhere near as much uh those cheap paints really really did disappoint me they were dripping everywhere so i'm hoping this won't it says it doesn't so we'll see how we go with it i've got my mask on the room's well ventilated and so let's start spraying good coating and if it's as good as it says we shouldn't get any drips obviously this stick is only there to hold it with it'll be withdrawn eventually
22:24 and we'll get all of these done it will get two coats but i'm gonna sand down lightly with the 400 grit emery cloth between coats [Music] this one's obviously going to be difficult but if you do the trip first on these things because we're going to be sanding down anyway it's really just to give it a layer okay and
23:09 now we're just trying to get paint on me and we'll just have to leave it till we can come back and do the next coat good morning well before closer play last night i managed to get the first coat of black paint on the float bodies dry i've sanded them down with the 400 grit emery paper and i got a second coat of paint on it and of course it's now morning so everything's dry i've done the same on the stems oh sorry the antennas so we're almost ready to put the final touches to this project but before we do what i wanted to show you is this is my standard float adapter and and all you do is put it onto the bottom of the float body in the usual way
23:57 and attach one of the antennas then what we can do this is going to be the 4aa version so i've got four aas on there i did actually do this before i started by the way but just to give you an idea that makes it sit just like that which is exactly where i wanted it the 3a version works just as well the 2aa version i must have taken just a fraction too much off it's it sits fine it's just going to take a fraction less than 2a but literally now i've done that i'll dry these off and all i need to do is to take a sharpie marker and just write the shop loadings on in exactly the same way as i did with these ones like that then
24:45 i can get a final spray coat of polyurethane varnish on it and we can get started on just finishing the the painting of the tips so they end up looking like that i'm just going to use some of this water-based lure paint which i picked up at the tackle shop and paint on the the bands as with the other ones over here these are going to be exactly the same as this one with the yellow top one with a black top to cope with different conditions so i'm going to need to put a base coat of white down in 10 millimeter sections all the way down the antenna
25:37 so in the end i put two coats of white on and two coats of yellow and i just checked to make sure that these are a good fit and in fact one of them wasn't too great to fit so i've just put another bit of black on there just to build it up a bit so you've got a decent tight fit on there so folks that's pretty much all there is to the antenna floats which are designed for fishing on the lift method having said that as a bonus for you here they are far more versatile than that and for example if you just take a piece of the the cane the barbecue skewers and make yourself up an antenna you've now got a nice slim insert float float similarly same piece of cane
26:26 but with this section here which is the plastic internal from that uh ballpoint pen you've now got an insert but with a thicker top bit more buoyancy if you need to let's say you're fishing somewhere really shallow and you want a shorter float you can just put a shorter insert in and you can just make these up and just keep them in your tray so i think in the very near future i'm gonna use one of these floats to show you how to fish the margins with a waggler and with a very small float because of course you don't want a great big long float when you're only fishing that much water anyway that's it for another one folks hope you enjoyed it as always if you did please click the like button if you want to subscribe you can do that too and until the next
27:11 time bye for now [Music]
