Neutral buoyancy is very had to do. The wood will dry out in your tacklebox and soak up water while you are fishing.
My procedure for existing lures (usually plastic):
If I am doing an existing bait, I put bigger (and thinner) hooks on it first.
Put the painted bait with hooks and hardware into a glass bowl of water so you can see it. Hang pieces of solder on the hooks until the lure just sinks. Trim with a nippers. If both hooks are on the bait. you can adjust the solder to make the bait float level. Weigh the solder. You can wrap the solder on the bigger hooks without reducing the hooking efficiency.
If you are careful, the bait will just hang in the water for 10-15 seconds. It looks very lifelike to me. However, the weighted hooks slow the bait action.
If you are making your own wood bait, remember, when you drill the hole for the weight, you reduce the wood volume and make it the bait less buoyant. Let the air out of the hole before you do the balancing.
The drilled hole must be toward the bottom of the bait or it will tip over.
You have lots of options:
You can rough guess a balance point or make two holes. Melt the weighed solder into the holes in rough proportion to the weights on the hooks.
You can use a small drill to drill out solder to trim the weight or melt more solder (tricky once the bait is wet)
Put a small piece of wire crosswise in the hole (or reverse taper the hole) to help grab the solder.
If you go to a woodworking store, they can steer you to dense woods. I know one professional musky lure maker uses "jelutong" (spelling?).
It is a good project for Wintertime. Fishermen are crazy.
Best of luck!
