Baitsonline sells a wide range of bait making ingredients to enable a huge range of custom baits to be made. Below are some simple guidelines on how to make your own boiles.

Basic equipment you will need:

• A saucepan, larger the better. Ideally with a chip pan strainer.
• Some sort of mixing bowl for the ingredients.
• A set of scales for weighing bait ingredients
• An egg whisk.
• A couple of mixing bowls.
• A syringe, 20ml is ideal
• A boilie sausage gun. (Gardner Tackle)
• A boilie rolling table. (Gardner Tackle)
• A few trays lined with a dry tea-towel.
• A space in the freezer if you are going to store the bait

Firstly gather the bait ingredients together and start by deciding how much bait you wish to make. As a rough guide about 5 large eggs are needed for making a 500g mix. Take the eggs and and crack them open into a bowl. At this stage add any flavourings, colour or liquid foods such as Minamino and any soluble additives such as Betaine. Now whisk the eggs etc. thoroughly.

At this stage it is worth mentioning that you should always err on the side of caution with the amount of flavouring or colourings that you add to your bait mix. Fish are many times more sensitive to flavours than humans and as a rule of thumb adding above the recommended levels of a flavouring or additive will make a bait less attractive and cost more money to make. Some commercial baits contain high levels of artificial flavourings and colourings not to attract fish but to fool the angler into thinking that the baits are more effective than their rivals' baits. Do not be fooled, if a carp can detect a worm or small crustacean buried in a muddy pool bottom then they will probably be very suspicious of a bait steeped in artificial flavouring.

Once the eggs are mixed weigh out the remaining dry ingredients into a large mixing bowl. Mix these remaining bait ingredients thoroughly, do not hurry this stage and make sure all the ingredients are well mixed. It takes longer than you think to get a really thorough mix. Once well mixed you are ready to add the ingredients to your eggs. The number of eggs you need will have to be found by trial and error as all mixes differ to some extent.

Now add the dry mix a bit at a time to your whisked eggs stirring and then neading into a dough. Keep adding the dry mix until the dough looses its tackiness, once the dough is at this stage keep neading to ensure a really good even dough is formed. If you are rolling a very tacky mix then a good trick is to add a fish oil, this will aid the neading and the rolling process.

You should now be ready to put large sausages of dough into your sausage gun. Get your rolling table ready and squeeze the sausage gun to form 1 to 3 long sausages across the rolling table. If you are having problems roll 1 sausage at a time and if you find the bait is sticking to the table and wont roll "grease" the table with a little fish or hemp oil.

Warning.... don't mix too much bait at a time using a sausage-gun quickly makes your arm ache!

Slide the two sections of the table together to form the round boilies then gently pick-off or tip the boilies into your trays. Any malformed boilies can be recycled into your mix.

Once you have made your boilies the next stage is to boil them in your saucepan. Fill the saucepan with water place your basket in it and bring the water to a healthy boil. (Add a pinch of salt or sugar at the stage to aid the boiling process.) Now place some of your boilies into the pan but do not let the water go off the boil. The hardness of your bait is directly influenced by the length of time you boil them for. The longer the boil time the harder your bait will be. However do not boil your baits for longer than necessary as it will reduce the nutritional value of your boiies. As a rule of thumb, boil the baits until they float, or a maximum 2.5minutes for a 14mm bait.

Once your baits have boiled for long enough remove them with the strainer and place onto a towel and gently dry their surfaces. Do not be tempted to plunge the new boilies into cold water. Once the surface is dried place the boilies into you trays and leave there to thoroughly cool. Do not bag or store the baits whilst still warm as this is likely to alow mold to take hold and spoil the baits.

The baits should now be ready for use or long-term storage in a freezer.

As an alternative to boiling you baits you can try microwaving a few. Be warned though you do not get the same results with microwaving as you do with boiling. Microwaving makes baits much more bouyant so experiment to see the results you are likely to get. Microwaving can be an excellent way of making pop-ups from the same bait mix.

A few general tips...

• Until you are sure of your base mix just mix up a small initial batch.
• Use fish oils to make the baits less tacky. Salmon oil is ideal.
• Use artificial flavourings and colours sparingly.
• Make a few pop-ups by microwaving. (Doesn't work with every mix.)
• Don't worry if your boilies aren't round, carp won't mind!
• Make your baits with clean hands but don't wash with antibacterial soap use normal unscented soaps.
• If you smoke then it is well worth investing in a few pairs of surgical gloves. Cigerette smoke is one of the most persitent odours there is and will quickly get transferred to your bait whilst making the dough.
• Experiment, experiment and experiment.