Make Your Own Breather Rubber Skirts

We have many customers who prefer the soft, supple action of rubber strands for their jig and spinner bait skirts. The material of choice for making rubber strand skirts has been the multi-strand rubber ribbons commonly called living rubber.  The multi-strand material was a product of the textile industry which now operates almost totally off-shore and as a result the multi strand rubber is very difficult to obtain. We now have an alternate rubber material available for making your own breather rubber skirts.  The material is available in the form of multi-strand pre-cut layers which you assemble just like our popular silicone layers.  This is the material that is used to make Super Breather Rubber Skirts.
The Breather Rubber Layer is 2' wide  and has about 60 strands that are 3" long.  There are approximately 18 to 20 Breather Rubber layers per ounce so this is very economical to use. These layers are available in a variety of colors and the skirts can be trimmed to a shorter length if desired. A breather rubber skirt usually has 2 layers in it but you can make the skirts as thin or as full as you like.  You can make the skirts in any combination of colors. We have found that a half layer accent color can add a lot to the skirt.
The procedure to make a breather rubber skirt is very simple.
	1. Select the layers you want to make your skirt with and stack them up. 2. Using any of the skirt tools available, expand the collar, roll or fold the layers up and place them through the collar just to the point where the un-cut part of the layers sticks through. 3. Release the collar onto the rubber strands.
You now have a finished skirt.  You can trim the excess solid part off if you want to although we usually do not find this necessary.  We recommend that you leave at least a little of the solid part of the layer un-trimmed and sticking out of the collar to keep any of the strands from slipping through the collar.  The breather rubber skirts are usually reversed on the lure.  This adds to the breather action and makes the skirt appear fuller.
This Breather Rubber Skirt is being made from 2 black layers and 1/2 of a blue layer for a blue accent.  Stack the layers on top of each other (not offset as shown in the picture. We placed them this way so you can see there are 2 1/2 layers).  Roll or fold up the layers and place them through a skirt collar.  Note that the collar is placed where the strand cut starts. Your skirt is finished.  You can trim off some of the excess roll if you want to, but we do not usually feel that it is necessary.  The skirt on our jig has been reversed on the jig head.
BREATHER SPINNER BAIT SKIRTS are made by the same procedure as above.  The example we made here has 1 fluorescent yellow chartreuse layer, 1 fluorescent green chartreuse layer and 1/2 yellow layer.  It makes a very full breathing rubber skirt.
This is a "SPIDER" style rubber skirt for a Spider Jig. The rubber skirt in this example is made from 1 brown layer and 1/2 an orange layer.  The procedure is the same as for the black/blue skirt, except that the collar is placed farther down on the strands and the solid part of the layer is trimmed off to make the spider type skirt.  The placement of the collar can be varied to change the length of the "spider legs". This type of skirt is very popular for many fishing applications.