Finished 14mm cork ball pop ups

[LC1975]

Hello,

Does anyone know if a finished 14mm cork ball pop rolled with a 10mm cork ball will hold up a hinge or chod rig? All the places I know that sell them only do them in 16mm.

I was thinking about making my own and don't want to waste money on hardware if 14mm finished hook baits are not up for the job.

Thanks

 

[yonny]

A real good 10mm cork ball will be ok but it's tricky to get really good cork balls nowadays. It's a lot safer bet using 12 mm cork balls for a 14 mm pop up.👍

[hutch]

I agree with Yonny the rule of thumb with cork balls used to be use a cork ball 2mm smaller than your intended bait size

[Carpy George]

On 17/03/2026 at 20:08, LC1975 said:

Hello,

Does anyone know if a finished 14mm cork ball pop rolled with a 10mm cork ball will hold up a hinge or chod rig? All the places I know that sell them only do them in 16mm.

I was thinking about making my own and don't want to waste money on hardware if 14mm finished hook baits are not up for the job.

Thanks

 

 

[Carpy George]

Hello there, It all depends on your hook size/weight of hook, It certainly wouldn't hold up a size 4 Korda chod hook which I use as even when i've used 12mm cork balls (gardner) and made them into 15mm cork ball pop ups they have flopped on me in around 14 hours. 

[salokcinnodrog]

On 17/03/2026 at 20:08, LC1975 said:

Hello,

Does anyone know if a finished 14mm cork ball pop rolled with a 10mm cork ball will hold up a hinge or chod rig? All the places I know that sell them only do them in 16mm.

I was thinking about making my own and don't want to waste money on hardware if 14mm finished hook baits are not up for the job.

Thanks

 

 

On 18/03/2026 at 07:09, yonny said:

A real good 10mm cork ball will be ok but it's tricky to get really good cork balls nowadays. It's a lot safer bet using 12 mm cork balls for a 14 mm pop up.👍

Cork ball quality has changed, and gotten worse over the years.

Over harvesting of the bark, less than 9-12 years, and drought in the Mediterranean has meant that top rated cork is no longer used for cork balls, so lesser grades are being used. The basic answer is that where a 10mm cork ball would pop-up a 16mm bait, now they struggle with a 14mm and 12mm is the real limit.

 

I've mentioned it in the long distant past about making cork ball pop-ups, and the best results I got were sieve the base mix, remove any lumps before adding your liquid and mixing.

To your base mix, if you can add 10-20% of sodium caseinate, it is a buoyant ingredient and will assist with making your pop-ups pop-up.

 

The smoother you can get the skin the harder it is for water to get in and affect buoyancy, and even make the boilie mix come away from the cork ball. Not fun reeling in just a cork ball, and I've done that a few times long ago, hence my pedancy for getting it exact.

 

The next thing is testing every pop-up against your hooks. Dry them after boiling, test and then dry again. It is quite possibly why I prefer tying cork ball baits on over piercing them. It reduces water getting in to the bait. As water gets into cork it expands slightly meaning the skin gets pushed off.

 

Pedancy, or pedantry, both correct, and definitely disapproved...

 

[LC1975]

11 hours ago, salokcinnodrog said:

 

Cork ball quality has changed, and gotten worse over the years.

Over harvesting of the bark, less than 9-12 years, and drought in the Mediterranean has meant that top rated cork is no longer used for cork balls, so lesser grades are being used. The basic answer is that where a 10mm cork ball would pop-up a 16mm bait, now they struggle with a 14mm and 12mm is the real limit.

 

I've mentioned it in the long distant past about making cork ball pop-ups, and the best results I got were sieve the base mix, remove any lumps before adding your liquid and mixing.

To your base mix, if you can add 10-20% of sodium caseinate, it is a buoyant ingredient and will assist with making your pop-ups pop-up.

 

The smoother you can get the skin the harder it is for water to get in and affect buoyancy, and even make the boilie mix come away from the cork ball. Not fun reeling in just a cork ball, and I've done that a few times long ago, hence my pedancy for getting it exact.

 

The next thing is testing every pop-up against your hooks. Dry them after boiling, test and then dry again. It is quite possibly why I prefer tying cork ball baits on over piercing them. It reduces water getting in to the bait. As water gets into cork it expands slightly meaning the skin gets pushed off.

 

Pedancy, or pedantry, both correct, and definitely disapproved...

 

Thanks for the detailed info, it's much appreciated.

[yonny]

On 26/03/2026 at 09:57, salokcinnodrog said:

Cork ball quality has changed, and gotten worse over the years.

Over harvesting of the bark, less than 9-12 years, and drought in the Mediterranean has meant that top rated cork is no longer used for cork balls, so lesser grades are being used.

In 2024 I visited the worlds largest cork producer in Portugal with work. It was amazing.... saw all the processes from harvesting of the bark down in Lisbon (they even let me have a go!) all the way through to production of wine stoppers and everything else they make up in Porto. Was one of the best work weeks I've had. Those trees take 12 years to get to the first harvest then once every nine years after that. It takes nearly 50 years to get to the quality required for natural wine stoppers. Some of the trees were 150+ years old.

It makes sense, having seen all this, that the price of decent cork balls has gone up so much.

They have something like 4 million acres of trees and in the middle of one of these huge plantations they had a reservoir providing the water. I was standing there watching the water (as you do as an angler) and a big common whalloped out. I pointed it out to my host, their technical director, and it turned out he was a carp angler too. He had this reservoir full of massive carp in the middle of nowhere that only he could fish. Incredible.