
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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