Other Proven Spinnerbait Blade Shapes
(Oklahoma, Deep Cup, Thumper, Fluted, Chopper and Ripple Blades)
In addition to the big three (Willow, Colorado and Indiana), there are a handful of other proven spinnerbait blade shapes. Most popular among these would be the Oklahoma blade.
Oklahoma Spinnerbait Blades
Oklahoma blades run a little heavier, a little thicker than your other standard bass blades. They have a tight, rapid vibration too. They're popularly used in Northwest Pacific and Alaskan ocean salmon fishing, and also on pike and musky spinners. They're big blades with a lot of vibration, thump and flash. Bass love them!
These Oklahoma blades have a creased centerline. This makes two sides to the blade. Without the creased centerline, a comparable blade would really only have one smooth side and one flash. But these Oklahoma blades emit separate flashes off both sides and a third flash emitted by the centerline crease itself.
Oklahoma blades are a great shape match for young-of-year shad species, sunfish and crappie fry. They also present a rapid, tight spinning motion that matches the tight vibrating swimming movement of these deep-bodied bait species.
My favorite times to "match the hatch" with Oklahomas are late spring through late summer. Starting in late spring, dense sheets of newly-hatched sunfish, crappie and other panfish fry are a phenomena that helps lure bass away from the spawning shallows and out towards the post-spawn outer weed beds. During that time of year, look for butterbean-sized sunfish and crappie fry that seem to infest the offshore grass beds. You'll know the bass are keying on them when you see sheets of sunfish and crappie fry sprinkling out of the surface of the offshore grass beds by the hundreds and thousands in unison. A passing shadow or lunging bass may spook them. This happens especially on overcast days, low falling barometers, and in the late afternoon and early evening hours when the dense sheets of fry are more inclined to rise toward the surface. Other times, the fry masses may be laying low to the bottom, and slow-rolling an Oklahoma blade spinnerbait pays off handsomely. But whether on the surface, suspended or deep, the shape and flutter of an Oklahoma blade mimics sunfish and crappie fry.
By late summer into fall, mixed sizes of shad become a reason to use Oklahoma blades too. There can often be several mixed sizes of shad layered together in schools. Under ideal conditions, some adult shad can spawn every month during summer, and that leads to mixed size schools of small shad. When you see these mixed size schools or pods of small shad, they are often layered. The smallest shad will be a few inches above the mid-sized shad, and the largest shad will be on the lowest level of the school - just like a spinnerbait! So 2 different, graduated sizes of Oklahoma blades on a spinnerbait can mimic these mixed size schools of shad.
Here are a few more (not all) tips for Oklahoma Blades:
- Double Oklahoma Blades. Any time of year, a #3 Oklahoma spaced well ahead of another #3 or #4 Oklahoma gives a spinnerbait the appearance of a pod of small deep-bodied baitfish. The same baitfish pod effect is achieved with a #4 spaced well ahead of a #4-1/2 Oklahoma on larger 3/4 to 1 oz size spinnerbaits.
- Single Oklahoma Blades. A single #4 or #4-1/2 Okalahoma (without any front runner blade) is awesome used on the drop. Just let it helicopter down next to some form of cover, a ledge or bluff wall, and pop the rod tip occasionally. Bass will belt it on the fall or as it lays on the bottom, bass will scoop it up.
- A #2 Oklahoma can be quite useful as a front runner ahead of most any other blade type. You'll typically see a small Colorado used this way, but the #2 Oklahoma makes a great alternative instead of the customary small Colorado front runner.
- Oklahoma/ Royal Blade Combos. Oklahoma and Royal blades go great together. I tend to like a wider spacing if a smaller Oklahoma is used in front of a relatively bigger Royal. I tend to like a moderate spacing when a smaller Royal is used in front of an Oklahoma. Either way, Royal and Oklahoma blades go great together.
A #2 Oklahoma can be quite useful as a front runner ahead of most any other blade type. You'll typically see a small Colorado used this way, but the #2 Oklahoma makes a great alternative instead of the customary small Colorado front runner.
Double Oklahoma Blades. These blades beat hard, fast and tight. I often like to use the double Oklahoma pair of blades when fish are busting schools of shad. The double Oklahoma blades "match the hatch" when mixed sizes of shad are present. Shad may spawn several times during the summer months. That means mixed and multiple sizes of small shad start to tack up in the same areas in autumn months. Multiple sizes of shad in autumn will swim together in "layered schools" with the layers of smaller shad staying higher up. Middle size shad in the middle layers, and bigger shad comprise the bottom layers of these stacked shad assemblages. I often feel a spinnerbait like this one imitates three sizes of shad: 1) small blade, 2) big blade, and 3) head/skirt swimming together in a pod.
Oklahoma blades, when widely-spaced to help create the illusion of individual baitfish in a small pod. To me, the frantic, fast vibration of an Oklahoma blade appears more shad-like than any other blade type. The deep-bodied Oklahoma shape presents a rapid, tight motion that matches the tight, fast, vibrating swimming appearance of frightened shad.
It's not widely-known that a single big Oklahoma blade makes a great deep slow-rolling spinnerbait. The big heavy Oklahoma has a tendency to hug the bottom better than other blade styles. Whatever level you let it sink to, including the bottom, the Oklahoma will track closely to the target depth better than many other blade styles.
#6 Oklahoma Blade. The huge #6 Oklahoma blade has a larger presence in real life than the photo depicts. This heavy monster blade will vibrate not only your rod tip but your entire arm right up to your shoulder will feel like you're pounding a jackhammer into a concrete slab. There's hardly any other spinnerbait set-up or barely a big-billed crankbait that vibrates as much. Fish love it.
Deep Cup Colorado Spinnerbait Blades
These Deep Cups have similar features to standard Colorado blades except the cupped lip creates less torque and decreases water resistance when reeling them in, so they won't physically exhaust you as quickly, especially with bigger-bladed, heavier spinnerbaits. The Deep Cup Colorado blades have slightly less (but still a ton of) vibration and can be reeled faster and easier than standard Colorados. Importantly, the Deep Cups are still Colorado blades, therefore the Deep Cups give you more vibration than most any other blade shapes.
Deep Cups are rarely used and relatively obscure. About the only usage you'll see with some regularity is a small size #2 or #3 Deep Cup Colorado as a front runner blade. The merits of this are that a small Deep Cup does not influence or interfere with what the back blade is doing as much as a standard Colorado interferes with and influences the action of the back blade. So a back blade acts more like an independent single blade with a small Deep Cup than with any other front-runner.
Double Deep Cup Colorado Blades. Whenever a fish's visibility may be limited, I like this blade pair. What conditions come to mind immediately are dingy water, dark skies, low light or night fishing. Those are good moments when limited visibility offers opportunities to try double Deep Cup Colorados.
Visibility is also limited in thick grass, simply due to the dense weed growth that can block a fish's ability to see very far even in clear water under bright skies. Double Deep Cup Colorado blades excel anywhere that heavy grass or other thick cover hampers the ability for a bass to see a bait, they can still feel, find and explode on this throbbing spinnerbait due to the powerful vibrations the blades emit.
You can't run this bait straight through the grass or it will bog down badly in a ball of weeds. It's best to have a few inches of open water above the grass. A heavy downpour is something that may raise the water level a few inches above the top of the grass beds for a few days. That's the perfect opportunity to run this spinnerbait in the skinny inches of open water over the grass where you really were not able to fish before the sudden downpour. A bounty of fresh bass, often big ones, will barrel up and out of the thick grass to grab the spinnerbait scurrying in the open inches of water overhead.
Seasonally, one great period to use these spinnerbaits begins about mid to late August. This is when grass beds have reached their maximum summer size, and then begin to atrophy and shrink in size. Green canopies that had been luxuriously sprawled across the surface all summer will start to collapse and "fall" under the surface, leaving sunken pools of water caving in across the grass beds. Even a few inches is enough to run one of these spinnerbaits across the sunken grass pools. Bass will tend to strike when the spinnerbait approaches the "banks" or edge walls of these sunken pools of water in the grass. Just before the spinnerbait hits the impenetrable green edge of the pool where it will be smothered in grass, that's a high percentage strike instance.
In spots where the grass doesn't sink to form pond-like pools or "salad bowls" in the grass, the thinner sections of greenery will still recede and withdraw in irregular ways, leaving more isolated clumps or "bastions" of grass that emerge and appear more prominent as the thinner grass around them withers away. With semi-open water emerging around them, these residual clumps become safe bait havens and therefore magnets to bass. Bass that were spread out in the grass during summer will cluster on the emerging clumps in early autumn. That's the time to work one of these spinnerbaits right around these newly-emerging grass clumps that can become red hot spots for bass and anglers. Double Deep Cup Colorado blade spinnerbaits will draw a lot of strikes when pulled closely past these grass clumps.
Around these vestigial clumps, over the shallow pools and salad bowls, in the thin open bands and skinny rims of water, concentrate to keep your spinnerbait running free of grass. No matter how good you are, you'll spend a lot of time pulling grass off your blades. But do it right, and you'll spend lots of time pulling bass off your spinnerbaits too.
An important aspect of this particular blade pair is the sizing/spacing. You rarely read about blade pair silhouette and the overall appearance that blade pairs present to fish. These double Deep Cups have been sized and spaced to optimize their silhouette and appearance together.
Most things you read about spinnerbait blades talk about two properties - flash and vibration - that all blades have to different degrees. You rarely read about motion and action in spinnerbait blades, meaning the combined movements that blade pairings/spacings present to fish. The Deep Cup Colorado blades shown here are pair-sized and spaced to maximize the motion and action these two blades jointly present to fish.
Thumper Blades
It's common to call any single Colorado blade a "thumper" blade. The blade described here, however, is no ordinary Colorado. It is the ultimate Thumper.
What makes it thump more than any other Colorado blade is first, it is a thicker, therefore heavier blade. Thicker material (stamped brass stock) is used - but that's not all. The cup or concave/convex curvature of the special Thumper blade is shallower (less cup) and flatter than ordinary Colorado blades. The shallow cup, flattened blade and thicker material causes it to thump to the maximum degree.
Try one of these, and you'll never call an ordinary Colorado blade a thumper again.
The Original "Helicopter Lure". One thing that a single Thumper blade does exceedingly well is for the big blade to "helicopter" when it free-falls. Whether it's pitched in shallow cover, dropped down rock walls, worked up and down stairstep ledges, or with a lift-drop technique in deep water, the Thumper blade helicopters, hovers and parachutes better, descending more slowly than other blade shapes on the fall, which is when many bites happen. Even during a steady retrieve, it is a high percentage move to suddenly pause and let it 'copter a moment. You'll get a high percentage of strikes then.
Short Arm Colorado. The spinnerbait market today is limited in terms of style and variety. That wasn't the case in days gone by. There were many more styles of spinnerbaits in use at one time or another, but they have all faded into relative obscurity. Nowadays, ninety percent of the spinnerbait market is either double willow blades or else a small Colorado in front of a willow. One of the "fallen stars" not often seen anymore is the short arm Colorado. It's specialty lies in slow bottom-bouncing, slow-rolling in deep water, and vertical jigging where you can use a lift/fall retrieve or yoyo it in deeper water. It also excels as a dropbait in shallow cover, and can be used like a jig pitched and flipped into weed, wood and rock cover. It's deadly to bounce it through the limbs of flooded trees. Be ready to get bit the instant it bumps its way free of a limb. The wire arm diameter is often heavier because they can be used in heavier cover with heavier rods than usual for spinnerbaits. Unfortunately, the short arm spinnerbait has become a forgotten lure to many anglers.
Fluted Spinnerbait Blades
Fluted Blades. These work superbly, but are rarely ever used on bass spinnerbaits. That's puzzling because Fluted blades are the most popular and productive blade worldwide for pike and musky spinners. It gets its name from the Fluted tail which gives a fish tail or fish fin look, reflects light in varied directions, and causes rippled turbulence not found in perfectly smooth blades.
Since most of a Fluted blade is smooth, you still get a larger flash off it, but many smaller flashes off the fluted tail. Keep in mind, there are also Willow and other blades that have this fluted tail stamped on them, but those are not the classic "Fluted blade" as we talk about it here.
One can see where the Fluted blade may have shared its early origins with an Indiana blade, but it's not correct to call the Fluted blade a sub-variety of an Indiana blade. The Indiana blade is over 100 years old, and has changed very little over the years. The Fluted blade is almost equally as old to begin with, and there isn't one dimension or property of a Fluted blade that hasn't been optimized into the oversized pike and musky blade it was way back when - and still is today. It's really the one blade that pike and musky anglers use most, so there's been a lot of attention.
For bass anglers wanting to gauge size comparisons, a #2 Fluted equates to a #4 Indiana, and number #4, #5 and #6 Fluted blades equate to #6, #7 and #8 Indiana blades respectively. These sizes of Fluteds make great bass spinnerbait blades.
A few (not all) tips for trying different sizes of Fluted blades are:
- The #2 Fluted blade makes a great front runner ahead of the #4 or #5 Fluted or ahead of other blade styles.
- The #4 can be used in pairs (two #4) or combine a #4 in front of a #5 or #6.
- A single #6 Fluted blade makes a great night fishing blade or use the single #6 any time you want to get the biggest trophy bass.
Those are just a few suggestions. Try this super pike and musky blade for bass. You'll not be sorry.
Here is a comparison photo and size chart for the Fluted (and Indiana) blades shown here:
| Style |
Size |
Length |
Width |
| Fluted |
#2 |
1.144" |
.630" |
| Fluted |
#4 |
1.515" |
.814" |
| Fluted |
#5 |
1.800" |
.972" |
| Fluted |
#6 |
2.114" |
1.114" |
| Indiana |
#2 |
.836" |
.500" |
Indiana (IN) and Fluted (FL) Blades. Photo not actual size. Photos not same scale as each other.
A pair of Fluted blades.
Other Fluted Spinnerbait Blades
Actually, there are two different meanings of fluted blades:
- First, there is the "Fluted Blade" itself. This venerable old style is unique. Although shaped somewhat like an Indiana blade, it is not an Indiana. Historically and presently, the "Fluted Blade" is and always has been popular on musky/pike lures (but not on bass lures).
- Second, other fluted blades (Willow, Oklahoma, Royal, etc.) may have fluted or scalloped tails stamped on one end. Compared to a perfectly smooth blade, the fluted tail does break up the flash and it ripples the reflection a little. Yet it is hard to say there is any substantial advantage or disadvantage of the fluted tais. One thing fluting may give is the impression (at least to me) of fish fins or fish tails. So I like to add fluted blades on spinnerbaits to suggest a fin/tail effect.
Mostly, I consider other fluted blades to be a fine folk art embellishment rather than anything strategic. If you ever see antique spinners from the late 1890's or early 1900's (eBay is a good place to see vintage spinners), many of the earliest spinners had fluted blades. The Fluted Blade or other fluted styles (Willow, Oklahoma, Royal, etc.) provide a "retro" or nostalgic look to me because fluted blades were some of the earliest of all blades. Please enjoy.
A Fluted blade ahead of a Fluted Willow.
Double Fluted Willows.
A #2 Fluted blade makes a great front runner ahead of a Fluted Oklahoma blade.
Fluted blade ahead of a Fluted Royal blade.
Fluted blade ahead of a Fluted Royal blade.
The rayed tips of Fluted blades may give the impression of baitfish fins or tail.
Fluted Royal and Fluted Oklahoma blades
Double Fluted Royal blades
Chopper Spinnerbait Blades
This completely flat blade has no concave cup, except for a cupped lower edge. The shape is remindful of the Shannon Twin Spinner that used blades like the Chopper as early as 1915. This blade spins smoothly with low vibration, almost a finesse effect. I tend to use the Chopper for flat calm water or for highly pressured fish.
Willow/Chopper Blades. These spinnerbaits have a unique blade pair that is remindful to the human eye of a fish body (Willow blade) with a fish tail (Chopper blade). On a spinnerbait wire arm, the two blades look to be on different planes on the wire arm. In the water, however, the blades align one behind the other on approximately the same plane. They spin very well together, at approximately the same rate, presenting the overall illusion of a singular minnow body and tail. Due to the wide angle of rotation, they plump up to resemble a full-bodied minnow appearance.
Another big merit of this blade pair is both blades spin very easily even as the lure is falling through the water. That is not always the case with other blade pairs. Often, the front blade stops spinning on the fall. In some other combos, the front blade impedes the ability of the back blade to spin on the fall. But those problems are not as bad with the Willow/Chopper combo. It is one of the most easy-turning, free-spinning combos on the fall, which is a high percentage strike moment. It is also very easy to start turning right away as soon as your spinnerbait hits the water.
Colorado/Chopper Blades. The biggest merit of this blade pair is both blades spin very easily even as the lure is falling through the water. That is not always the case with other blade pairs. Often, the front blade stops spinning on the fall. In some other combos, the front blade impedes the ability of the back blade to spin on the fall. But those problems don't exist with the Colorado/Chopper combo. It is one of the most easy-turning, free-spinning combos on the fall, which is a high percentage strike moment. It is also very easy to start turning right away as soon as your spinnerbait hits the water. It is a great blade combo to pump, lift-and-drop or yo-yo because the blades turn easily both when pulled or reeled up and when allowed to fall. There are many small start-and-stop movements with such tactics. Many other blade pairs fail miserably with these tactics, but not the Colorado/Chopper combos you see here. It's the perfect for stop-and-go spinnerbait!
Ripple Spinnerbait Blades
Ripple blades are rarely seen on spinnerbaits, even though they produce great catches.
Ripple blades don't come in larger sizes and therefore work best on smaller 1/4 and 3/8 oz spinnerbaits. I tend to use a #4 Ripple as a front runner ahead of a #5 Ripple blade on both 1/4 and 3/8 oz spinnerbaits.
Ripple blades have an oval shape similar to Willow blades, but Ripples are rounded at each end, not pointed on the ends like Willow blades.
When putting a Ripple blade on a clevis, unlike other blade types, the cupped edge of a Ripple faces out. The cupped edge does not face in like other blade types.
Why try Ripple blades? What Ripples do is to create tremendous vibration and lots of lift, due to water pressure against all the ripple planes and the cupped edge. True to its name, it ripples through the water. It's a very noisy blade that attracts a lot of attention without a lot of bulk. In that regard, it is approximately the same profile as small Willow blades, but the Ripple has much more lift, lots of vibration and rippling turbulence.
Comparatively speaking, a #4 Ripple is about the same size as a #3-1/2 Willow, but a bit wider with the pointed ends rounded off.
A #5 Ripple is about the same width but shorter (due to the rounded ends) that a #4 Willow.
Here is a comparison photo and size chart for these Ripple blades. A #3-1/2 and #4 Willow blade are shown to help you gauge size.
| Style |
Size |
Length |
Width |
| Ripple |
#4 |
1.328" |
.538" |
| Ripple |
#5 |
1.495" |
.585" |
Ripple blade size compared to Willow blades.
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