Tag: 3d printing

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Complete Lure Design Course – Let’s Add the Details

Complete Lure Design Course - Let's Add the Details 1


All right guys, now we’re jumping into the part I think everybody’s been waiting for- we’re going to add some cool details onto this lure. Now, I’ve loaded the twitch bait design that we liked most during our testing back into Fusion 360. This twitch bait had a little chamber in here and I went along the timeline at the bottom and we don’t want to start adding details here because we want to work smarter, not harder. So we’re going to bring it back before we get started chopping up this lure and doing all the mirroring and combining and all that. That’s where we’re going to add our details, let’s go.

Backing up the Timeline in Fusion 360

All right so I think I want to come back all the way, basically before that eyeball gets in there. Sometimes this is tricky because you have to move stuff around. So my eyeball comes in here, but I combined all the bodies back together at this step and what I want is the bodies combined but I don’t want the eyeball in there. Let me show you a little trick you can do. I’m going to come up to this, past this fillet area here, and I’m going to take this and drag it. Now what I’ve done is I’ve switched those things around so I’m actually combining the body here, then I take the eyeball out there. So what I can do now is come in here and at the point I want, I just move it to where I want. Caution about moving things too dramatically around the timeline, you can really mess things up, but usually if the steps are not dependent on another step that you’re working out of order it should be just fine.

Creating a Sketch for the Gills, Mouth, and Body Split Line

All right, now I’m here and I don’t have my eye in there which is great and we’re ready to go. What I want to do is I want to create a sketch on the plane, on this face of the body. I’m going to come in and I’m going to make an offset. I’m going to do that by selecting the outline of the lower body and I’m going to do an offset in negative 0.4, just slightly trying to keep everything inside that body because we’re going to be doing some extrudes. We don’t want to come outside the boundaries of this object because we’re going to extrude from the object. Now we can actually turn off that so I just have this sketch now and what we’re going to mainly focus on is the head section first. I like to start by defining the back boundary, seeing how low the head goes and then I’ll add my details in there. I’ve been getting into more angular head designs so I’m popping back on this body. I know my eye is in this area of the front section so I want to keep that in mind because I want the eyeball to be inside the head. I’m just going to go very simple here.

Then we’re going to start adding our details here. Again, this is all about art and making what you want to make. Don’t get hung up on the way I’m doing it here, it’s just a phase I’m in with angular gill plates. Of course, you can make these any shape you want, they can be rounded or whatever you’d like. If you’re following along at home, I would just chill out for a but until you see what we’re doing because it will make much more sense once you see how we’re going to use these things. All right, I’m going to keep them big and chunky since I don’t like to put tiny details in my lure designs but if you do, you can go absolutely crazy here. Again, I’d suggest you’d watch my process before you get too crazy.

making a mouth on a twitch bait in Fusion 360

Alright, let’s put a mouth on it. I don’t usually do mouths but let’s add one. We’re staying with the angular pattern and we’re going to do something super basic since I’m keeping it simple. I’m going to do a lateral line so this ladder line does a couple of things. One, it’s going to be part of the design on the lower body and I’m also going to use it to split the lure when I start to do the body details. All right, fit point spline here and give it just a little bit of a curve. You can do what you want to here. I should have labeled my eye sketching here somewhere, so I can see where my eye is going to be. Now we can finish sketch and we’re going to extrude. I’m going to hit the E key on my keyboard and we’re going to extrude all of these sections in the head area first. Again, this is where adding too many details can really drive you crazy.

Creating the Overall Head Shape

So there’s two ways to approach this if you want to create a shape from the main lure shape. For your head, you can extrude this from the profile plane and I’ll show you what that does really quick. So if I extrude this out, I just grab this and move it over and I want to do a new body. We’re going to do a new body on a lot of stuff and so what I look for here is to keep it roughly the same nose width here. We have some wiggle room since we made a new body to change the angle. This is not a super scientific way to do things, you just have to guess. Let me also show you the other thing to do. The other wat to do it is instead of profile plane, do object and select this object. Now look what that does, it keeps all of the curvature of the body. Let me see if I can get a good angle here so we can keep the curvature of the body and the relative shape. Obviously, we don’t want it to be too big so you may have to play with the numbers. Now we do have to do negative because we drew on this face back here. If we drew on the plane, this would actually be a positive number which helps you know when you’re going the right or wrong way.

So now we have this little guy and one thing that this method gets you is that funky edge we can take care of and I’ll show you how. The most important thing here is the new body. Now we have this body and I’m going to rename it to “head” because that’ll make it easier later. Now let me show you something that I learned recently that blew my mind. If we click the move copy and we select faces and actually select this face right here, select top view, grab this and move this around. That’s really why we made this a new body, if we would have joined it together at that point you would run into all kinds of problems. You can’t go too far past where it starts to crush this edge right here and what I mean by that is this front edge can’t go past itself, it can’t fold over itself. Fusion 360 doesn’t like what happens and it will adjust. What this does is now we’ve widened the back, we’ve flattened down the front and we click okay. This gets this edge much closer and, again, we have room to play with this so don’t freak out just yet. Now what I’m going to do is rename this to “details” because that will help us later. We then want to turn that sketch back on and we can turn off our body sketch.

Building the Gill Plate

Now we start building the gill plate section so we're going to hit E for extrude. I like to start at the ones closest to the front of the bait so we’ll select this one. We’re going to make this one section since if you made this a bunch of little section it can get tricky. Then, we’re going to select this object and our distance is going to be around negative .4 since we want to have a stair step. You can see they just come out from there and we actually want to make these new bodies again and I’ll show you how to do that in a second. Remember that .4 and now we’re going to keep on going down the line so we have these section in here. We’re going to object select this object and let’s do negative .46 and do a new body and say okay. So we have these lower sections that I did here, and then these new bigger sections here. So we’re going to keep extruding this and create this diamond section here. From object select, select that object and do a negative .9. We’re going to do new body and click okay.

So let’s make this a little easier, now I have all of these bodies over here and the reason we made them new bodies is to make this next part easier. I’m going to come in here and if I turn off my head section and grab this edge, I’m going to hit fillet and round those edges over. I’m rounding out the leading edge here that’s closest to the bait. You can obviously do this on all of these other edges if you want to because they are individual bodies and it makes it a lot easier to do. If this was all one big joint body, Fusion 360 would get super confused because you have too many surfaces involved. I’m going to combine all of these guys together, join them and then name them gills. We turn back on our head and we turn back on the tutorial twitch and see what we’re looking like now. I think it looks pretty good, not too bad.

building the gill plate in Fusion 360

Extruding the Fin

So let’s keep going, let’s do an easy one here. Let’s turn back on our details and let’s extrude this guy. I’m going to go from object and see a pattern come in here. We’re going to do negative .7. If you haven’t figured it out yet, which I don’t think I made it very clear in the beginning, that distance is how far out from the body this particular feature is going to be. The distance is up to you, how big or small you want to make it from the body, but that’s what this is for. All right, we want to make a new body again and click okay. Then, we’re going to angle this out just like we did before with our move command, faces, select this face and just give it a bit of a tweak. You can play with this command all day long, I’m just going to place it where I think looks good here. Then one thing you can do that we can’t do if we joined these together is I can actually go to move bodies, select this, and bump it back into the lure a bit more so I can have even better control over how I want this lure to look.

All right, let’s see how this math looks. Now like I said, I’m pretty terrible at mouths, I don’t do them a lot. I’m going to do object, select our head here and do negative .5 which is where I ran into a problem. This head section actually got shrunken in and so this outline is outside of the head section so we can solve that pretty easily later on. So I’m going to skip this step right now and this is one of the problems you can run into with this technique but it’s easily solvable. It’s really more of a sequencing issue more than anything. Alright, now we got our head on there and it’s pretty far out actually. What you can do is remove bodies by selecting the head and the gills together and move them all in there. We’re going to change the top here, you can figure out what you want this to look like and just move it into place. It might be hard to see but there’s this edge here that flows back that’s an original part of the lure.

Combining the Head and Gills, and Making the Mouth

Now we have a much more natural fade in. I think we’re at a point where we should combine all the gills together with the head to make that all one piece. So we just click combine head gills, join, don’t keep tools, and then click okay. I’m also going to label the fin. Now we have our head, which has our gills on it, then we’ll separate the body from the main body. I don’t really like the way it wraps up here, the bottom actually came out. The quick and dirty way to get rid of that is just to create a sketch on this plane and we’re just going to draw a line which will go about right here. Again, it’s our people finish sketch then we’re going to use the split body command and we’re going to split this body and use this tool. Now I have head 1 which is the main head and the top half. If I just hide this body, bring our tutorial twitch back on and now you can see the fades a bit better. Now you can adjust that however you want, you can use a curved splitting tool if you want or you could leave it like how I’m doing it.

combining the head gills and mouth of lure in Fusion 360

Now let’s go back to our mouth and add the details sketch back in and hit the extrude button. We’re going to hide this head here from object. Again, let’s just say .5. If you wanted to, you could get in there and fine tune your sketch and go back to your details sketch and edit and then basically add a line here to there. Then when we go to extrude, let’s edit feature and we want to make sure that we unselect that bottom part, select that, click cut, okay. We just cut it out from there and we’re good. I don’t know if you can tell, but in here we can see how it’s kind of shaded. We actually have the head poking through so when you come over here, objects to cut, pull that down so you can see all the things the profile actually goes through. We wanted to cut that head section as well so you can use this to only cut certain parts. It’s pretty powerful once you get use to using it. I apologize for this terrible, terrible mouth.

Inverted Ribs on the Lower Part of the Lure

Now what we’re going to do is combine the main body. I’m going to turn off our fin and turn off our head for now and we’re going to split the head off and the body into multiple pieces to add our other details. So if we click back on this sketch and we click split body my drawing tools are going to be on this outside drawing edge here. Then right click okay. So let me turn that off, we got the main head of the lure out of the way and we’re going to split it again. This body split tool is going to be the lateral line we put in there and click okay. We want to get that detail sketch out of the way and then we want to figure out what’s here, which is the bottom. I just rename that twitch bottom and twitch top. Now what we’re going to do is we’re going to do a hatch pattern across these guys so I want the bottom to be just these lines going that way and ten on the top we’re going to do the hatch. So we can start by just having the bottom and we’re going to make a sketch and I want the lines angling 45 degrees front to back here and be sure to check that they’re long enough. Before I create a rectangular pattern, I’m going to go all the way past the end. How many you need is up to you. The lines represent where each hatch mark is going to be so you can add as many as you’d like. Click on okay and we finish sketch.

Now it gets a bit tedious. We’re going to create another sketch on that plane and we’re going to create a project to surface face. This face curves and all these lines are a long vector. For projection direction, you want this back and forth, you can see it working because you have these red lines. Hopefully you want these kind of cutouts. You can ignore the warning, it’s just because we drew over the face but we want to make sure that we had all of the body covered. Click okay and finish sketch. Now we can turn off this sketch and the easiest way, I’ve found, to do this is actually a bit of a hack. We go to create form, create pipe. I’d like to change this global diameter first and let’s say .5 millimeters. Just select all of those guys, including the ribs, click okay then finish form. I made a mistake here because I didn’t close my pipes so just be sure to close those. So the end we want to be spikes are square and it doesn’t really matter, we want our mode to be round. You also want them to be closed because we want them to be actual bodies and not just surface bodies. Now we click okay and finish one so we still end up with roughly the same thing, we end up with all these bodies. Now what you can do is obviously if you want ribs that stick out, you can just leave them as is and combine them together with a join. What I’m going to do, is I’m going to cut them out which this process is the same so I click combine. Our target body is the twitch bottom, our tool bodies are all of these guys. I can click one, hold down the shift key, and click the others to select them.

Creating a Hatch Pattern on the Top of the Lure

Once we have them all selected, now we have our hatch pattern or these scratches in this particular section here. Moving on to the top, I’m going to turn on the top right side here, looking at the right, and what I think I want to do here is not go all the way over the top with this hash pattern. I just want to keep the pattern to the front face of the body, but I also don’t mind it wrapping around the bottom because the bottom is a little thinner. I just don’t like it wrapping around the top for some reason, but again you can do whatever you want to do. What I’m going to do is draw a sketch here on this plane, draw a fit point spline because we’re going to chop this up and I’m also going to hollow out the curve here. To work the curve, you can grab this handle and move it up. I don’t want the sketch points on there so I’ll use split body to select that and click okay. Now I have a top one and a high top as well as this small section here. What we’re going to do is basically the same thing we did with the one way hatches but we’re going to do more of a diamond patter now. So we’re going to draw a sketch on this plane and draw a line 45 degrees, be sure to put the angle in first that’s what I didn’t do last time. Make sure that you’re all the way past and we’re going to create a rectangular pattern on this guy so make sure you go past the end of the lure. Again, how many you want to do is completely up to you.

Now to make things easier for us, we’re going to do this in two separate sketches and you’ll see why in a minute. We’re going to finish this sketch and we’re just going to create another and one thing I want to do is project this whole line and that point, click okay. We’re going to draw another line and I want to be even with the first line we made. We’re going to come down to 135 degrees which is basically 45 degrees from 180. My other angle is 45, so we want to keep it at the same angle. We’re going to come all the way down again, and we just want to make sure that we’re past the bottom of that body right there. Next thing I’m going to do is dimensions. This is going to be 1.5, then I’m going to create a rectangular patter and again, make sure it’s all the way over the body and we’ll just do 30 for now. You can play with this all day long, this is where your art comes in. We’re going to click okay and finish sketch.

adding hatch marks to lure in Fusion 360

So now we’re going to do the same thing we did late time with our lines for our belly but we’re going to do them in two steps. I found this to be the best way to go about things because if you try to do them all in one sketch and use the pipe command, it tries to connect those pipes together and you end up with all kinds of problems. Even though it’s longer and more tedious, I’ve found this way to work the best. What we want to do first is re-label these because it’ll be easier, then we’re going to create sketch then project to surface which is the same thing we did last time. After some trial and error I finally have my projections and what we’re going to do is exactly what we did last time when we created the hatches on the belly of the lure, just in two steps. So we go create form, create pipe and line it up so we can easily select these. I’m going to change my global diameter to .5, which is where we were before, we also want to make sure we have square ends. Click okay and finish form.

Then we have a whole lot of bodies here, so what I’m going to do is rename my backs. We’re going to go ahead and create our other pipes first and then we’re going to do our cutting and removing. If I end up needing to keep these separate for whatever reason, the backslashes and the forward slashes, I know what my relative range is. There’s probably a better way to do this but I don’t know it so please feel free to leave me a comment. We want to hide all of these for now, we’re going to turn our forward slashes back on and we’re going to do our projection again. Same thing, we’re going to create a sketch here, project the surface and select this surface, select these curves, make sure you don’t select the projected curve. We’re going to do a long vector then we we’ll select okay and Fusion 360 will give me a warning because I didn’t select all of them. It’ll take a while for Fusion 360 to deal with the problem since Fusion 360 isn’t the best program to run on a Mac. Okay, once that works out click okay, finish sketch. Before we create a new form, we want to make sure we turn off that other sketch because we don’t need it right now and we just want to deal with this guy. We’re going to go to create pipe and create a .5 square.

Now that we’ve done that, you can see we have all of our front and back bodies here. I’m going to bring our backend ones and to do that I’m going to shift-click all of those and go to show hide. So now that we have our cross pattern, I’m going to try and combine these together in one shot. This could fail miserably but let’s see. I click combine target body, I go from the back one all the way down to the end there. My operation is cut, I definitely don’t want to keep those tools around. Now I know some of you are saying “hey dude, couldn’t you have done that all in one shot with projecting them and creating a pipe over the crosshatch?” What happens when I do that is Fusion 360 tries to bring these sections together and make one solid pipe, so you don’t get this 90 degree angle. Also when you get into sections like this right here, sometimes Fusion 360 doesn’t create geometry that’s valid and will fail and you won’t be able to get out of there. So I know this was a fairly long way to go to get some crosshatch pattern, but it’s really the way I’ve found that has the most chance for success. So now we can start to bring our bodies back together and you can see what we got. Now the other thing I could have done is use this original sketch down here to match these up. It’s possible, you just would have to draw your sketch longer next time.

Adding a Lateral Groove

One thing we’re going to do is we’re going to go back to our details and we have one more thing we’re going to add. We’re going to add this lateral line in to really clean up that edge. What we need to do first is we want to combine all of these bodies together. We click combine and the first one you click, it doesn’t really matter from a technical standpoint, is what this thing is going to be named. I’m just going to call it twitch top here, and then we want to join the altogether and click okay. Now we’re all back together and I’m just going to rename this one to twitch bye and then, you guessed it, one last project, create a sketch on this backplane. I’m going to create, project to surface faces. There’s not a great way to go about this, just select and make sure you’re only selecting the flat ones there. You can see I have my red line right here and click okay and wait.

adding lateral lines to lure in Fusion 360

All right guys, this is, again, yet another complication of doing scales and these hatch lines this particular way. When we went and selected all of those faces to do our projection on, what we end up with is a line that that is in a lot of different parts. You can see that it has all these different segments so we can’t use our pipe command, which would just be too easy. So we have to go, again, go back into the forms editor, create the pipe, select all of these and choose your size. We want to make sure it’s square ending, as you can see when we get in here that we have these gaps and that’s where those crosshatches came across.

Let’s bring our twitch body back and same thing, we’re just going to combine twitch body tools and we’re going to cut. So you can see why I don’t like to make a lot of super fine detailed hatches, it’s just going to take a while and put a lot of strain on your computer. So we can bring back the fin and you can see the fin goes over the top. Then what we want to do is combine all these back together. Then my tool bodies are all here and visible and we want to of course join it all back up and click okay. We are all done now, you can come in here and you can get a little bit cooler if you want to clean the lure up.

Pulling Forward in the Timeline

So let’s go forward, edit this feature and my selections. I want this and that, I want those three and I’m getting it where I want it except for the math which is bothering me. Don’t worry, you can do better. So now that we added, we went back in time on the timeline and we pulled that back to add in all these extra steps, we should be able to pull forward in the timeline and get back to where we were before this whole thing started if we did everything right.

We have a few problems and that’s pretty normal, I’ll show you where you can go and fix this so you can see what’s going on here. I didn’t extend out past where this bump is so the easiest thing to do there is just knock that out and we want to do that before we do our mirror. Then we can go back and just finish the sketch with that eyeball on it which is this body section sketch, turn that back on, hit E for extrude, grab that circle and come all the way out with a cut that will cut that hole back open for us and click okay. That took a little bit of work but it sorted out our problem and it looks pretty cool. Now we can pull forward another error again here. So the problem is because this is now combined with this body, you can see I have my fillet after I edit my combined bodies. The easy way to fix this is just delete that fillet and pull my timeline here, fill it to the .1 and add that fillet in there and then go to combine. Remember, I mentioned earlier about things getting a little weird and that’s one of the situations.

3D printed lures

The Printed Lure

I know that’s not the most amazingly beautiful lure you’ve ever seen but the concepts are the same, it’s just how much of an artists you are and how much time you’re willing to spend. I find that the fish don’t really care. I’m going to go ahead and print this and I’ll show you the results.

Hey guys that turned out pretty cool and I hope you liked that episode. I know it was long, thanks for hanging in there. Next week, we’re going to talk about adding crankbait lips when you’re making crankbaits and the specific steps I go to for designing and implementing them. That video will be right HERE.

Take care-Tight lines

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3D Printed Resin Wake Bait, a New Era Begins

3D Printed Resin Wake Bait, a New Era Begins 2


First off, let’s talk design principles. I don’t want to do any gluing which is the traditional way of making lures by gluing two halves together. I don’t want to do that and we don’t need to do that since we’re 3D printing. I also don’t want to sand, or in my case, sand as little as possible. It’s difficult to print at least a rounded lure on a 3D resin printer without having to do some sanding from the supports but we’re going to minimize tat as much as possible. Also, ballast or internal weights. I don’t want to add any weight to this lure since it’s a wake bait it’s supposed to float so as long as we get the weight distribution correct, it should float straight up and down like we want it to pretty easily.

wake bait principles

Designing Wake Bait in Fusion 360

Let’s see how we design this lure in Fusion 360. Once I have my body in place I basically want to use a rather organic shaped split line. My thought here is the back part is going to be solid, the body is going to solid resin and the top part of the lure will be the hollow shell. Then, I just execute the split command using that line so I end ip with three bodies. Then, I shell this middle body here and this weight body here. Then, I design my lip and I just place it into the body and I combine those bodies together, cut the lip out of the body but keep the lip here. So then I do a sketch in the front down the center line which I will use to extrude the back part here. Then the front I want to angle so I have this sketch here. After I sketch that line on the plane, I’ll just use the pipe command to fill in those holes.

wake bait design in Fusion 360

Then we move along to the more interesting stuff here which is making the eyes. I draw the eye and then I use the offset command to offset another circle in about 1.5 millimeters. What they want to do is extrude the center hole all the way through and then this hole for the outer ring will go out about half a millimeter to give me this little inset to place my eye into.

Patreon

Hey guys, I know what you’re thinking. I know you’re thinking, “Dude, I don’t want to model a lure, I don’t have time for that! I just want the file!” That’s where you need to join my Patreon community where every month I release all the fishing lures I’ve designed. Whether that;s a hard lure, soft plastic mold, even tools like stencils that you can 3D print on your own 3D printer at home, It’s only $12 a month and you can do whatever you want with the files. You can print them yourself and sell them, you can shoot a bunch of my lures that I designed and sell them to your friends and neighbors and people on the internet. The files comes totally royalty free so follow the link HERE to join for $12 a month.

Freshly Printed Lures

We get our lure out of Fusion 360 and it’s printed. The one thing you’ll see here is that it is very plain with no additional fins or gills or anything like that. When I’m prototyping a lure, I wait to add all of those thing at the end. It doesn’t really impact the performance of the lure but the way I do it is by exporting it out of Fusion 360 and into Blender which is where I add all the fancy features. But, until I get the lure absolutely dead solid perfect, adding everything to it is just a waste of time.

So I’m actually using a blend of resins to print this lure. I’m using Siraya Tech Build with some added Tenacious. I would guess that I used about 30%, I just dumped it in there to look good. The Tenacious adds flexibility which helps actually strengthen the lure body itself and it helps with when I’m putting in the screw eyes that they can kind of bite into the resin instead of it cracking and expanding too much. I don’t know if this is the perfect mix yet, it’s just what I had on hand. We’re going to be getting into resin mixes and which resin is best for 3D printed lures in future episodes.

3D printed wake bait

So I decided to go ahead and print five lures because it takes the exact same amount of time to print one as it does to print five. I figured if I messed up any during painting, or if one had any damage while putting it together I would have some extras to work with. After printing, we just let them go through a quick wash and denatured alcohol, curing and then we are pretty much ready to go. I decided to do some extra curing on this particular lure to make sure that the inside was very well cured. Now I don’t think this is 100% necessary, especially if you’re not using a clear resin because that internal cavity will cure very well. But in this case, I’m going to put some plastic beads and maybe a beanie or two in there and I want to make sure that inside is very firm and well cured so they don’t stick in there. I also printed some diving lips, in this case, more like wake lips on my other printer with some Siraya Tech Blue clear. Again, don’t get too hung up on the exact resin I’m using, my main concern was that t was clear and Siraya Tech Blue clear was the only clear resin I had on hand. It just so happens to be an extremely tough resin, which is great, but I’m not so sure it’s necessary.

Painting the Wake Bait

So before we put that dive lip on we’re going to put the screw eyes in and we’re going to do all of our painting. The dye lift is pretty much the last thing that goes on before the clear coat. This makes it somewhat easier to paint and I don’t have to tape up and mask off that lip which can make painting more difficult.

painting wake bait

Finishing the Lure

So the last think I do after painting is put on the hook. I put a swivel on the back, I don’t like to put a treble hook on the back of my wake baits. For me personally, I’m fishing over a lot of oyster reefs and oyster beds with a lot of grass and so that extra hook in the back doesn’t lead to anymore hookups and it really increases the amount of snags I get. All right, we’re done and let’s see how it floats. If I was smart, I would have done this before I put all this work into it but I just got so excited to paint this lure and see how it works so let’s throw it in the tank and see if it floats. Now that I know that it floats, let’s test it out.

Gone Fishin’

It’s a beautiful morning to test if this wake bait works. It seems to be pretty perfect actually, it’s looking good. I got a nice trout and roughly 8-10 fish and I’d say a majority of them were on my wake bait, it was a good day. I do throw a soft plastic for a little bit and caught a few speckled trout on them, but all the redfish were on my wake bait. But really, there’s nothing better than catching fish on a lure that you made and in this case I made it from scratch. I designed it, painted it, the whole nine yards.

fish caught using wake bait

Fishing Retrospective

Here’s a quick peek at the lure after I was done fishing. Looks pretty good, no major issues. I think most of the scratches you see on the lure are actually from the hook and not the fish. It survived just fine and I was throwing it over oyster beds and all kind of stuff. Like I said, I think there’s four or give redfish on there and at least a couple of speckled trout.

Hey guys thanks for watching! If you’re interested in buying a 3D printer for fishing lures or mold I have a whole playlist HERE where I break down some of the things you need to think about when you’re purchasing a 3D printer. As I progress with this lure and add more videos they’ll be in the lure playlist HERE.

Take Care- Tight Lines

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The Future of Custom Lures is 3D Printed

The Future of Custom Lures is 3D Printed 3


Before we dive into lures 4.0, let’s go back in time and talk about the three major ways that lures were made in the past. The first well-known lure design material was wood. With wood, you would just whittle it, carve it out and then paint it. Once it was painted you would add your hooks and then you would be ready to go. People do still do that today but it takes a ton of time and a lot of skill and I don’t have time for that. Then you take a look at resin lures and this technique is where you usually make a master mold and pour resin inside the master mold to get, again, a solid body of a fishing lure that you then add your hooks and paint and all that kind of stuff into. It’s easier to mass produce using this method but it still takes a ton of time and generally is kind of a one-by-one process.

clear lure 3.0

The lure 3.0 is how they’ve mass produced lures today. Injection molded halves that are glued together and then whatever weights and ballast and rattles are then added. This method is state of the art today when it comes to mass produced lures and it is largely out of reach of the home lure maker. So with lures 4.0, my design goals were very simple. One, it had to be well within the reach of the home user using 3D printers, and in my case, specifically resin 3D printers. Resin is the future of lure making and we’re on 4.0 so let’s go with it. Two, no gluing. I don’t want to print halves and glue them together, that is prone to all sorts of problems with alignment and can get the two halves off and it’s really just an unnecessary step. Three, no ballast weights if I can help it. We want to add weight to get the lure to sink further in to the water that’s fine, but I’d really like to have all the weighting integrated into the body. Whether that’s a solid body or a hollow body or as you’ll see soon kind of a partially hollow body. Last but not least, no sanding or as little sanding as possible. We want to get as close to taking a lure off the printer, painting it, and rigging it up as soon as we possibly can. Now no sanding is not totally reachable when you’re talking about resin 3D printing, we do have to print the lures and add supports and the supports generally require sanding after the fact.

wake bait lure

So I’ve been working on this lure for about a month and a half and I think I have a good solid design so far which is this wake bait. It has amazing action, I can print it and it has proper ballast weights in there and it floats so it makes the waiting a little bit easier to deal with. I have 3D printed lips that I print separately, I could print these together if I wanted to but I print them separately because I want them to be clear. All in all, it’s a great lure. I haven’t gotten any fish with it yet but that’s just because I suck at fishing, that’s not the lures fault.

So let’s break down this design and why it’s made for 3D printing. I start out with a solid body and then I break it up and draw this line to make my ballast in the weighted areas. I hollow out the middle part here. You can’t have a hollow body in resin 3D printing without having drainage so I decided to incorporate the drainage directly into the design by punching out the eyes all the wat through the hollow part of the lure. This has a number of advantages, one is that resin won’t get trapped in here. Two, I can cure in there if I really need to. Three, I can add any sort of rattles or any sort of BBs, anything else I want to add into the main lure itself.

multiple lures in 3D printer

So if you don’t want to design this stuff yourself, you just want to 3D print it and go you should join my Patreon where every month I release new lure bodies and new molds for soft plastics. I also release new 3D printable stencils and all that kind of good stuff for only $12 a month. If you want to sign up, just click HERE.

So one of the benefits to designing lures using computer programs is that you get perfect symmetry every time unless you screw up. When you’re printing, it’s going to be perfectly symmetrical for every single body and it’s easy to mass produce identical lures bodies over and over again. So these lures are easy to mass produce at home with an off the shelf consumer 3D printer. On my mid-sized Epax E10, I can print about 5 of these in roughly 5 hours. I might even be able to shove 7 on there if I really sat down and tried to figure out exactly how they’d fit on the build plate. The same amount of print time would still apply, 5 hours for 7 lures, it doesn’t matter. The same printing time would apply to as many lures as you could fit on the build plate. There’s no mold building, no carving, no sawdust, none of that mess. It’s super cost effective, on my wake bait design I can print 5 of these with materials costing under $2 which is about 40 cents per lure body.

lure in blender with skull

So as you get a design more refined, you can then take it into a tool like Blender and you can add all sorts of scales, bumps, ridges, and skulls if you want to really make this lure body your own without a lot of complex painting techniques. This is great for me because I suck at painting. I’m going to post a walkthrough of my complete wake bait design and that’ll be linked HERE. If you want to learn all the engineering behind making lures, I strongly suggest you check out Franco’s channel at engineered angler which is linked HERE.

 

Take care- tight lines