Tip number one- the split lines in your molds don’t have to be a plane and they don’t have to be straight. One of the great advantages we have in 3D printing is we can easily create curves or slanted surfaces and it doesn’t really cos us any more machine time or any more material than doing it with a straight line. So in this particular mold, if I would have done a straight split along the plane (this green line here) I would have missed the tail section and I wouldn’t have a working mold. So, I simply drew a line across the area I wanted to split to make sure it was connecting out the center of the tail section. The center of the tail section in the center of the front section of this lire ended up being like a .6 degree rise there, hit split, selected that line and my mold is perfect.
Tip two- this is part of a series I’m working on about doing hard lures in 3D printers and it’s taking me way longer that I thought it would. This is really hard, for me at least, to get these lures working correctly. However, I came up with this technique when I needed to hollow out a certain part of a lure and leave the rest of it solid and it marries on that split line not being straight. So here’s a lure body that I have and I want to make the top of it hollow and leave the bottom solid in the hopes that it’ll float right in the water belly down. So I simply draw a line that’s going to split the lure into two sections, one that I want to be solid and one that I’m going to hollow out. Next step is to use the shell command on the part of the lure that you want to be hollow. You’ll hit shell, then hit the lure body part you want to be hollow. You need to select the individual pieces and then it will basically remove that surface that you clicked on and make it look like a cup. Once you select the part you want to hollow, you type in the number. You can see I’m doing an inside shell which is going to rake the outer surface of the shell in and you just have to play around with how thick you want the shell to be. Then we just use the combine command to throw these two things back together and then you have part of your model shelled and part of it solid.
I hope these two tips are helpful, all of my lure making videos are HERE and subscribe to my channel so you can see when I finally figure out how to make these hard lures on 3D printers.
Take care- tight lines.