 danny's
I've never made plugs before, but I know a little about hydrodynamics. I'd make a guess that you should take the unweighted Danny's and design it so the unweighted version will balance on your finger at the widest part of the plug (design so the center of gravity is at the belly). Once you locate the CG on the plug, you should insert the weight right at this point. The idea is that it will allow the plug to move about freely and easily, centered at this point with equal mass in either direction (balance), effectively bringing down the minimum speed at which you need to move the plug to get it to wiggle. The slower a retrieve it takes to get a danny to start rolling is one of the methods I use to measure the effectiveness when tuning a particular model.
I could be wrong, but I'm sure some of the more experienced plug builders could give you some recommendations. It just seems counter-intuitive to me to bring the weight forward to help the plug roll. Also, plugs shouldn't necessarily be designed to cast well, they should be built to perform once they are in the water. Sometimes people get so fixed on getting maximum distance they forget that performance is much more important than castability (most of the time striper fishing anyway).  |