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Good to hear they will be available. Hope it goes well for you, and prayers to Jimmy's friends and family.

Well, I am with you in the first 10 at least. Pretty good info. Very hard to show it as slowly as it needs to be fished, at least from my limited vid shooting experience/experiments. I would glue that bait regardless of which head I fished. Eventually the keeper will tear out, plus you still have some wiggle at the head. Glue is like insurance against line twist and false "pressure bites". That tiny hog can be a real winner at times. Anymore, I don't venture too far from the cut stick. The TRD is fine, but have not seen that it fishes better than the cut stick so far. Had one day where I hit 10 keeper brown fish in about 2 hours on the TRD, including 3 over 18" and a 19" fish. Thought, ok maybe this is different. Next day took a friend to the same gravel stretch and we did the same thing with the cut stick. He had his PB brownie at almost 20". Will say the TRD does TX rig better, if you need to do that. When the TRD came out and convenience was mentioned, I had to wonder how lazy someone would have to be to not want to cut a bait in half. Must be the same folks who buy steaks pre-chewed.

It popped up in an email to Ned and myself last June while I was at the lake, after Babs and Beck really picked it up. Babler knew Ned was sensitive about the name, and wanted to work around it. They go back a bit. Ned featured the "new" name shortly after in a piece on his blog. Would have been about June 11 or so. Still have the email stored away. Folks...if you aren't catching fish with it, slow down, waaaay down, stop trying to cover water, and just fish. The little guy really flies in the face of all the "cover water and find fish" conventional wisdom. Fact is, most of us have a good idea of where fish should be, but simply zoom by them, even when fishing traditional finesse baits. It is mostly a big mental change. Lighten up your line, and don't get caught up in all the various retrieves. Swimming it slowly, with or without shaking, works great up shallow, and around grass. Deadsticking it is usually the deal on rock lakes- Table Rock, Stockton, the TN lakes, etc. Just dropping it down beside pole timber in 20', like a crappie jig, is killer on lakes where that is available. Rip rap and gravel are always good. If it is only producing little fish, slow down even more, and put it in cover. Dark, nasty places like brushpiles, and cedars. That requires a weedless head. By slow, I am talking about fishing 1-3 spots in a twelve hour day. At TR in April I had a day where I thumped fish that were stacked up outside spawn coves, some going in and some pulling out due to weather. I fished one side of a single secondary point for close to 5 hours, and caught fish and keepers throughout. After close to 20 years of fishing Table Rock, this spring was my absolute best for numbers of nice fish. Not killers, just solid 16"-18" fish, with some 19"/ 4# fish thrown in. We had several 20+ keeper days, and a couple that pushed 30 keeps. Fishing it deeper and in cover goes against some of Ned's canon, but it works like crazy. That is where I veered off his path a bit, by necessity. For some video links just search Ned Rig on YouTube. There is a recent video featuring Stacey King, an interview with Ned by Ethan Dhuyvetter (sp?-Sorry Ethan if not correct), some from myself that focus on location and presentation, and some from Don Baldridge on his WinkieDoodles channel that are just fish catching frenzies- at Table Rock and smaller MO lakes. A bunch of Don's are shot from a float tube. Glad to hear you are having fun with it T9.

It was B-Squared...Bill Babler and Bill Beck hung the Varmint name on it last summer, because Ned has never liked the other name. Ned seems to like Varmint well enough, and of course Zman has the other name slapped all over the new bags and heads. I've always called it "the little rig", except in videos. The "midwest finesse style rig" has always been too wordy to use. Like calling a TM an "electric positioning motor".