All right we got the lures printed, we removed them from the build plate, we washed them and we cured them. Pretty freaking sweet. Now what? Let’s go!
Clean Out Cavities
You now have an eyeball and a lure body, so one thing you’ll notice when we design these is we have this hollow cavity inside and you really need to clean that out extremely well. I like to use these pipettes but you can use anything to suck up your cleaning fluid. Make sure you squirt it in there really well and wash it out. Even after doing all that, I would still run into problem with beads, or anything I put on the inside, getting a little bit of residue on there and clumping up. I know what you’re thinking, secure the inside with a UV light. Well, I did that and I still get the same problem. I just think you can’t get a good solid clean in one go so my solution was simple. I grabbed some water-based Polycrylic but you can use whatever one you want, it doesn’t really matter. You can use any clear coat, I’ve even sprayed the clear coat in there before just to get it in there. What you want to do is get enough in there to coat the hole inside so I put a bunch in there and just rolled it around. Try not to make a giant mess, remember I still got an eye hole here so you don’t want to dump it out just yet but you want to get a nice coating over as much as possible. You want to dump all the excess, wipe it off, and let it dry overnight. Then you’re ready for phase two.
Sand Off Any Nubs
The first thing we’re going to do is sand off all of the little numbs that came from the supports we put on our lures. If you watched that video like I know you did, you know this particular lure is kind of screwed up because I was trying to go along this edge here to put my supports instead of along the back. You’ll see that by doing that, it makes it a lot more difficult. If I show you this little lure here, you can see the supports are right along the back I used sanding mesh because it doesn’t get clogged up. If you look at this 400 grit wet dry, it’s just a mess. It works great, but it gets clogged up really easily so I’ve been using the sanding mesh (which I have linked HERE) to sand these and it works a lot better. You can see here on the back edge here, it’s a little trickier to sand since I’m so close to my cool details. It doesn’t take much to sand this stuff, if you have something that’s particularly difficult to sand you can sand it after you wash it. But really overall, it’s pretty straightforward.
You’ll see the nose here is not perfectly flat, we got this ridge here, so you just want to make sure that you sand it down all the way. That’s really it, you can do a light sanding on the other parts if you’d like. I find that sometimes light sanding helps with adhesion but make sure you get all of the last little bits of uncured resin or anything like that. It’s probably not totally necessary, but I do think it’s pretty good practice.
Clean with Isopropyl
All right, now we just need to get all of this dust off. Let’s get a rag and a little isopropyl alcohol and I probably should have put gloves on for this. I just rub everything down and I use ice probe alcohol because it evaporates quickly. You can use water but 3D printer resin in particular absorbs water and that’s why we’re going to coat it with a clear coat and paint and everything because over time, it’s hydrostatic will absorb water and it’ll completely close up. After I clean this off, I’m going to let it sit here and make sure that all of this has evaporated off
Insert Rattles and the Eye Piece
Now what we’re going to do is insert any rattles that we want and then we’re going to put the eye into place which will be 3D printed. So, one thing I like to do is make sure that it’s going to be a relatively smooth fit in there, nothing too crazy. It’s a little tight, but I’m not going too far in there so it’s going to slide in just fine. Then we want to figure out what we’re going to put in there and I’m going to use these BBs that I have sitting here. This is a variation of the twitch bait I’ve been working on, and it has this underside front eyelet so I’m hoping this one floats. We have our BBs in here and you’ll notice if it tips this way, those BBs are going to come to the front, and they can pop up there. We’re about to put a bunch of super glue in there and so when we put the super glue around and put this into place, we want to make sure that this lure is nose up, so those BB’s stay back. If they come forward, they get super glue on them, and your rattles are ruined. This is the trickiest part of this whole situation. If you don’t have super glue you can use two-part epoxy and you want it to be relatively thick because you want to seal up this area as much as possible from a water standpoint.
Sand off Excess Glue
Sand off Excess GlueSo I put a lot more super glue on this side than the other because this side is going up top and we’re just going to press in there. I don’t want all this on the outside so I’m going to use my rag with isopropyl alcohol on it to get as much of that super glue off as possible. After that, I do a little more sanding there but I want to make sure that super glue sets up completely before I start tipping this bait forward. Again, you want to make sure all of that super glue is off of the outside of the lure so I hit it with some sandpaper really quick. Now, I’m not a perfectionist when it comes to lure finishes at all, I personally don’t think the fish care and I’m only making these for me. But if that super glue does get onto the outside of the lure it does impact the ability for the paint to adhere a lot of time. I just do my best to get all of that gunk off and as soon as the isopropyl alcohol evaporates, we’ll be ready for the next step.
Insert the Screw Eyes
So whatever method you’re going to use to attach hooks and line to your lure, this is the time to put a couple of those on so when we go to paint it we have something to hold on to. If you have a crankbait lip, now is the time t put it on as well. Having a little pair of pliers is super helpful at this point but I don’t have any near me so I’m going to use this bigger pair but be super careful. I found that these screw eyes I got from Barlow’s break off if you put too much pressure on them and that isn’t good. I got this relatively straight and I didn’t wait long enough so I got the ball kind of stuck in there. Hopefully, that’s a temporary thing but probably not which is why putting these in right is really important. I should have left this here for an hour or two and come back but we have this now so I’m going to leave it for an hour and let it dry. Now that it’s been about 30 minutes and I have sticky eyes, I don’t know if it’s super glue or something but it’s not good in there. Either way, the next thing we’re going to do is we’re going to put on a base clear coat. It’s important when you get this base on that it is nice and clean so make sure you don’t touch it too much afterwards. What I’m going to do to keep from touching it is put the lure on this clip and wire and we’re just going to hook this onto one of the screw eyes. It doesn’t really matter at this point whether it’s up or down, I like to keep everything tail down. I’m going to put on some gloves, give it one last clean and away we go.
Apply the Clear Coat
So this is the clear coat I’m using, this is the Krylon color max enamel gloss. I’ve used the rust-oleum gloss clear enamel as well and both of them seem to work just fine. I think you’ll be amazed at the change of this lure, it’s going to go from all scratched up to sparkly clear. I spray outside so that I have proper ventilation. So now we have a nice clear coat on there and again, you can use whatever clear coat you want, it’s up to you. I like to use something that’s pretty quick and easy at this pint because I have a lot of lures to do. So here’s what they look like when they are finally clear coated. I usually do 2 or 3 clear coats on them just to make sure it has a nice even layer and they’re ready to paint.
Results
So, at this point you are ready to test to see how your lure swims. One thing I will say is you want to make sure that you have this eye area where we inserted the eye tight, we don’t want water in there. You want to make sure you go over that part with maybe some thin epoxy to make sure it’s water-tight so when you go to throw it in your pool or pond or whatever, it’s not going to leak. If you get water in there, it’s a real pain in the butt.
In the next video, we’re going to get into painting and I suck at painting but I’m going to show you how to make it a little easier with some 3D printed stencils for both paint as well as stickers.
Take care- Tight lines