The Mother of All Tackle Autopsies - Cutting Open a 400 Dollar Swimbait!

Introduction: There are few swimbaits that can draw as much sheer awe from big bait anglers than the Roman Made Mother. Not only is the Mother a large bait at 11.8 inches it weighs in at a whopping 10.58 ounces and is the very definition of “exclusive” with a price point of over 400 dollars! While this bait could easily belong in a tackle collectors safe the tackle junkie within us beckons us to explore this lure further. What exactly does that mean? It is time to dissect this Mother! Welcome to what is definitely the “Mother” of all tackle autopsies as we put this bait under the blade.

Quite possibly the ultimate enthusiast swimbait, the Roman Made Mother retails for over 400 dollars each!

Not your run of the mill swimbait: The Roman Made Mother is elegant and simple all the same time, and exhibits straightforward lines and an attractive high quality finish that is super clean yet also can be considered relatively simple for a bait painted in Japan. Each Mother takes over twelve hours to produce through a labor intensive process that is still done by hand. Each bait is hand carved from special wood in the company’s factory near the shores of Lake Biwa.

The Mother dwarfs the Negotiator and weighs nearly 12oz.

The detail work on this bait is focused on the head which is more artistic than realistic, but make no mistake every angle on this bait has been carefully thought out and implemented with precision. When we measured every angle on this bait the tolerances were near perfect. The Mother does not come with any spare parts and is available in just one rate of fall. There are only a couple of finishes available for this bait as opposed to quite a few for the smaller Negotiator.

Trying to decide which Mother swimbait should be sacrificed

One of the key design principles behind this bait that Takeyama, the inventor, wanted to achieve was that it never stops moving, even when at rest between retrieve. He sought to do this through perfect balance and angling the bait so that when pauses it will not bunch up like so many other big baits or simply nose dive like an anchor. To maximize realism he wanted the Mother to stay straight and gently descend convincingly. We witnessed this behavior in our field tests and wanted to see exactly how he was able to achieve this exceptional balance... time to turn this Mother out.

Time to decide who is going to lose their bait to the autopsy... come on heads!

The Autopsy: Suffice to say we have been dreading the destruction of such a beautiful functional work of art, but from the second we fished this bait we knew it had to be done. Nonetheless we came just short of shedding tears before taking sandpaper and the saw blade to the bait. Something that simply cannot be said for any other product that we have autopsied. Prior to getting started we had two Roman Made Mother swimbaits in our possession, one of which belonged to Cal and the other was mine. The only difference between the two is the hook configuration and patterns. While the two of us had already established that we would do an autopsy on the bait we were not in agreement as to who was going to lose their bait for the sake of this exercise.

The most painful coin toss I've ever lost! 400 dollars worth of pain to be exact.

There was only way to settle this, a good old fashioned coin flip! To me this felt even bigger than a superbowl coin toss. I confidently called out heads and proceeded to flip the coin only to see it hit the ground and show tails! My heart stopped as I grimaced in agony and Cal celebrated with roaring laughter. My bait’s destiny was officially sealed.

The tail is glued in place but can be wedged out. This would ultimately be the easiest part of this autopsy

The biggest answer we hoped to obtain from this autopsy was to understand just how Roman Made accomplishes such a consistent and lifelike movement, even when the bait is at rest.

No matter how much we rotated or pulled the hook hanging wires would not come out