Bomber Lures Bomber 500 Series

Specifications

• Length: 68mm
• Weight: 16g
• Type: Crankbait
• Action: Wide Wobble
• Buoyancy: Floating
• Dive Depth: 1.5–2.4m (5–8 ft.)
• Hooks: Original trebles

Condition Notes

• Lure: excellent for its age - slight paint cracking
• Packaging: aged - in solid structural condition, but has discoloured a fair bit. Internal branding paperwork is in great condition. 

Description

The Bomber was born in the early 1940s when C.S. "Turby" Turbeville and Ike Walker fished the deep brushy water of Lake Murray in Oklahoma and their local Texas lakes, believing the 25-year-old Creek Chub Crawdad could be improved upon - carving their first prototype lures by hand in a backyard workshop in Gainesville, Texas. The Bomber Bait Co. at 326 Lindsay Street, Gainesville, Texas was the result - and the original wooden Bomber became one of the most consequential bass lures in American fishing history, still holding more bass records than any other lure. This example carries the original yellow and brown two-tone box bearing the tagline "Make the Big Ones Surrender" and the original paper insert detailing the five sizes and thirty-three colour combinations available - placing it in the early production era of the Gainesville founding location, before the brand passed to PRADCO and wooden production ceased.

The 518 colourway represents the most artistically ambitious finish in the original Bomber range - a hand-applied red-shad scale pattern of extraordinary detail, featuring hundreds of individually delineated scales in deep orange-red tones fading through amber to cream on the belly, with a red gill slash and gold eye that transforms a functional deep crankbait into a work of craft. Scale-pattern Bombers consistently command the strongest premiums in the vintage collector market precisely because this level of finish detail is impossible to replicate by machine.