Let's talk about how rigging and how I like to rig my Techno Frog. I really rig mine one of two ways. The first way is I rig it on the Ned Rig in situations where I have a relatively compact bottom and I need this kind of twitch along very subtly. It is the ultimate finesse fishing frog. Just sit it down, drag it along and give it a little jerk and it looks like a frog trying to hibernate dig into the ground, maybe to dig up bass eggs, since they are the biggest predators of bass eggs on the planet. Or they may think it's a frog that's completely messed up or dying and they just have to go and smash it.
Ned Rig
This is pretty straightforward, line it up and I demonstrate in the video how to pull it through. The second way I like to fish is on an Owner Twistlock Hook. You can use it unweighted or weighted, I like mine with a 16 ounce weight, it gives it a little but more heft to really chunk it out there in the water. It skips perfectly over those lily pads and when you drop it down it has this nice, subtle fluttering motion. The legs are just barely kicking, it looks like a frog that has jumped off and it's not doing well, the fish feel like they have to smash it. Also what you can do with this, is you can almost fish it like a twitch bait and throw it out there and just hop it in and the frog sits there and kind of jumps. You will get absolutely hammered throwing that thing around cover and brush logs because it's super weedless.
Twistlock Hook
I also have a demonstration of rigging it on the Owner Twistlock that's a 1/16 ounce. I stick that in the rigging nose and make sure it hangs straight and rigs to where it's totally weedless.
Worm Hooks
I got a question about rigging it on just a regular worm hook, so I got these Lazer Sharp 3-round bin worm hooks. They're not even EWG, they're just regular. So I'm just going to rig this into the rigging nose just a touch, I don't want to go too far in there and get that neck all the way in. This is very similar to how it's going to act on the Twistlock. I'm going to bring that back to here to that midsection, punch it through and boom. You see it sets right behind that hump in the head, the point does, so you can just kind of skin click it back there. It's very weedless, this is a very lightweight setup to sink really nice and slowly. So there's your third, bonus way to rig the Tecnho Frog.
All right guys, I hope that gave you some ideas. Please let me know if you're figuring out any other ways to rig it, I'd love to hear them because I think you can rig this any way you want to with that special rigging nose.
So the original concept of the Techno Frog was very much about fishing a frog and it's not like any other frog lure you've seen before. Everybody's used to throwing the top water frog, it's a classic and it's been done for a long time, but frogs don't only live on top of the water. Did you know that bullfrogs are one of the biggest predators of bass eggs? When they're on the spawn, they're not doing that for the top of the water, they're getting down in there and eating it up!
So we wanted to design a lure that specifically targeted that instinct in a bass to really whack the crap out of a frog that's down in the water, swimming around and we have done it. This is the Techno Frog.
The Techno Frog and Ways to Fish
So this lure smacks the crap out of bass, they have an instinctual reaction to it as it flutters by. You can fish it on a Ned head, if you have a hard bottom you can twitch it along on the bottom. My favorite way to fish it is with an owner twist lock hook with a 1/16th ounce weight on it. It hooks perfectly in the back and it's completely weedless, you can throw that thing up in the lily pads all day long and they absolutely inhale it, especially when you drag it across the top of that lily pad.
The Rigging Nose of the Techno Frog
One thing you'll notice on the Techno Frog is there's this little piece of plastic sticking out of its nose and that was a key part of our design which makes it like no other lure that I'm aware of. You'll see a lot of frogs, or even fish, imitations that are just the shape of the fish and ricking those can be very difficult and tricky. You have to get some special hook and parts that you can only be made in places like Taiwan and blah blah blah. So we said, you know what, we don't want fish like that. We want to have a variety of ways to rig this, but still get that very lifelike shape and appearance of a frog and that's why we came up with our ringing nose. You can throw a net head on it which comes out perfectly in the top of the frog's head, you can use an owner twist lock hook which comes out super weedless because that hook comes right up the back of the head, there's a million ways to rig it and hope you find one that works for you.
Keeps the Bass Guessing
If you've ever fished a lake where everybody gets on some kind of bite, whether it's a topwater frog or a Senko or whatever, you'll notice that it's hot for awhile and then it tapers off because the fish get used to it. I can tell you the fish in your lake have never seen a lure like this one so I hope you'll check out the Techno Frog.
Promo Code
The website is wmbayou.com which is linked HERE and use the code technofrog15 to get 15% off your first order. You guys are going to smash the crap out of the fish!
I’ve made a few videos on designing lures in Fusion 360, but I realized that the techniques I was using were fairly advanced and I completely skipped over a lot of the simple techniques for designing lures that will produce some great baits. Today we’re going to fix that by creating a simple curly tail grub using only three functions- sketch, extrudes and fillets.
First up, I want to share a tool that I think is critical for my design, the digital caliper. I have trouble visualizing dimensions in my sketch and comparing those to the actual size of an object. It’s also great for taking measurements of existing lures, say you have a lure that has the same size body as the one you have in your mind. You can just take a measurement using the digital caliper and put that into your design, it’s really handy. The link to the one I use is here but you can find these just about anywhere such as Lowe’s Home Depot, Harbor Freight, Northern Tool. All those types of places will have a simple digital caliper, you just want to make sure it has millimeters and inches.
So a few things to think about. First, before you actually dive in and start designing, you need to think about the overall length of the body and the length of the tail. If you’re making an injection mold you need to know where you’re going to split it and typically, for ease, you only have one split. So let’s jump into Fusion 360 and get stared.
First, I’m going to sketch the front of the lure. In this case, I’m going to use a simple 10 millimeter circle. The important thing here is that I’m placing the center of the circle on the center point of the Fusion 360 plane. This will make lining everything up and keeping everything symmetrical much easier. Then, I want to draw a center line that is the same length that I want the body of my lure to be. Now, I could have done this first and I probably should have, but the order at this point doesn’t really matter. The center line is just going to sit here to give me an idea about how far to actually extrude when I’m ready to. This is about simplicity, not accuracy. I work in millimeters because I’m going to 3D print this and 3D printers work in the metric system. Luckily Fusion 360 is smart enough to do the math for me. I can pull out this line and I can simply type 3 I N (for inches) and Fusion 360 does the math for me and converts those three inches directly into millimeters which is really nice.
Now the fun begins! The extrude command takes a sketch or a face and just pulls it out and makes it solid. It’s a very simple yet very powerful function inside Fusion 360. I could take this circle and pull it all the way down to the end and have a basic tube, but that’s pretty boring. What I want is my grub body to have a little hump in the middle so to do this we use the taper angle feature in the extrude command and make it a positive number. It’s going to grow out as I extrude and I usually just eyeball this step until something looks right. Again, we’re going for simple here not exact. So I get it stretched out to something I like then hit enter. I want to stretch out the hump section a little bit so I click on the back face of the taper and just extrude it out. Again, I’m just pulling and eyeballing it, we’re not engineering anything to specs at this point. Now, what I want to do on the tail is to take this hump section and taper it down relatively small, at least compared to the front of the lure. To do that I’m going to use the same extrude command, click on the back face, but instead of a positive number I’m going to put in a negative number. The negative number will shrink it down as it tapers and again I’m eyeballing this process.
So now that we have the basic shape of the body of our grub, what I want to do is smooth out these very sharp angles. So I’m going to use the fillet command and sand down those edges and make them a bit rounder. I click on the front face and hit the fillet icon and, again, just eyeball the process. You can type in a number if you know the number you want to use. Sometimes it’s easier to type and change the numbers but I’m just going to move it and see what I like. I’m going to hop over to the backside and do the same. What I’m going to do on the backside is I want it to be as close to a circle on the end as I can so I’m just going to pull it out until it gives me an error message. That error message means I’ve gone too far and from there I’ll back it up just a little bit.
So now that we have our body shape, let’s work on the tail. The tail is pretty simple, what I’m going to do is draw a sketch on the middle plane. Since I centered my circle in the beginning, I know that the middle plane is in the center of my lure body. So I draw a line across and I’m not too worried about getting it in the center and you’ll see why. I’m just giving it a basic width at the base then I use the fit point spline tool, which is how you draw curves in Fusion 360. The more points you have, the more control you have so you can usually be pretty “click happy” as you go around and make your points. Don’t try to add too many, but definitely have more points than less. If you want to add another point, you can simply right click and the click on insert fit point spline.
So I’m just going to sketch out a rough diagram on one side and try to match it up to the other side. I’m pretty terrible when it comes to drawing curly tails and I’m sure there’s a better technique out there to do it. Again, I’m just trying to show you an easy way to get a basic lure design. You can sit here and fiddle with these fit points all you want. Once you draw these out, hit the escape key t get out of the fit point spline tool. You can drag and click any of these points and you can also click a pint and then it has these green handles. The green handles let you move around and shape the angles of your fit point spline.
So again, we’re going to go back to the extrude command and exit out of the sketch. Hit extrude then select your drawing. The difference we’re going to make here is we’re going to make this a symmetric extrude and what that does is it takes the plan and instead of extruding the sketch one direction it extrudes it in both directions the same exact amount. So the number you type in here is going to be doubled to make the overall width, depth and height of your tail (how thick it is). So in this case, I want about a four inch thick tail, again it’s totally up to you on what you want, but I want four inches. So I type two in the box and we have a four inch tail. It’s not perfect, in fact it’s terrible.
So what I’m going to do is actually change the sketch that I had use in the original tail, this is a very powerful feature in Fusion 360. I simply right click on the sketch down in the timeline- hit edit- sketch- and that bring me back to my lure. I grab the points I made and I’m going to bring them to the inside of my body. So now it comes out of the body around and I actually find it easier to start wide, do the tail, and then come back and change the sketch. I’m not sure why, it just works for me better.
So now, we got our tail and we go back to the fillet command. Make sure you fillet the top and the bottom to make sure you can select them both at the same time. Now we’re done! We have a very simple curly tail grub. Next what you would want to do is probably make a mold so I have a couple of mold making videos and I’ll be doing a new one that has a simpler technique if you want to check it out. If you want to see how to add details like ribs and eyes to this lure, click here.
Hey guys! In part two of my mold making series we're going to get down and dirty in Fusion 360 to show you exactly how to create these molds and then print them out. This process normally takes me five to ten minutes. There’s time stamps in the description and you'll see them in the bar below the video. You can skip ahead to any portion you want to see. If I leave anything out if you have any questions about anything in particular, please leave me a comment and I will answer them in the next video where we're actually going to inject this mold and go test it out. Alright guys let's roll!
Making the Box
So we have our lure here. We're going to go and create a sketch on this plane and I’m just going to create a two-point rectangle and the size at this point doesn't really matter because we can adjust it later. You want to be thinking about where you're going to make your sprue hole to inject your plastic through and give yourself enough space there. So this one I’m going to inject right here at the head of the lure so I want to make sure I have enough space in front to put my sprue hole in place. Then I want enough space on the sides. Again, it's not terribly critical where we are at this point, we can always adjust it later. I'm going to take my rectangular square tool and draw a box. The sides matter because we need to put in some bolts, or some poles for our bolts, and we want to make sure that we have enough room for them.
So I do the box then I hit escape and now I’m adjusting the box out. What I do from here is I’m going to extrude this sketch object into a box. I come up here, and hit extrude my box. The key point here is my direction, I want to be symmetrical which is going to move it the same distance up and down. The sweet spot I‘ve found no matter what size lure you have is 15 millimeters, so I get 30 millimeters in total height. If I do 15, it's going to go 15 up and 15 down giving me 30 total. I found with 30 millimeters total, you have enough around the edge of the sprue to hold it in place.
Now if you know Fusion 360 at all, you can see its turning red which means it wants you to cut. I don't want to cut, I want to change my operation to new body. That's going to create a new box for me. Having a 17 millimeters body and symmetrical are the main keys there so I click on ok. Now, if I come over here and look at my bodies drop down, my twirl ball is here and I have this body too. The first thing I like to do usually is change the opacity or the transparency of this mold so I can see what's going on. Right click opacity control and I’m going to choose 50 so you can see we have our lure in the middle.
Rename, Opacity and Chamfer
The first things we're going to do here is prep the mold box before we actually make our Split. I’m going to go around and select these edges and I’m holding down the shift key as I’m selecting multiple edges. What I’m going to do is I’m going to add a chamfer, which is basically an angle to all of these edges. The reason I do that is it uses less resin and it makes it easier to get off the build plate when I print it. I’m going to print one of these edges flat to the build plate so I just go ahead and chamfer around everywhere to save a little resin. Now chamfer is different from Philip in that chamfer does a direct angle. I do two millimeters, which seems to work for me on smaller molds. You can figure out what works best for you. Now you can see I have these angles around there so again, I do this mostly for saving a little bit of resin and it'll be easier when I print to get under here and pop this mold off.
Cutting the Lure out of the Mold
Now that I have my box and my chamfers, what I want to do is cut my lure out of the box which is pretty simple to do. We're going to use this tool in the modify area and we're going to hit the combine tool and it gives me two options, target body and tool bodies. I'm going to select my mold and I’m going to select my actual lure so I have target body and lure body. My operation is going to be a cut and I want to check this box keep tools that's going to keep my master mold around and I just click okay. Now you can see it doesn't look like anything actually happened but if I come over here and basically turn off my master in the view, you can now see I have my hole in here. Now I have a mold at this point but I have no way to get any plastic in there, so let's fix that problem.
Making the Sprue
We're going to add a hole to the front, this is going to be your screw hole where you inject plastic. I click on the hole tool and then I’m going to click on this front face here, make sure you click on the actual face. We want to line it up roughly in the center, make sure you're looking straight on so you're not getting weird angles. It should snap into place and then there’s two way you can do this. One, you can make the diameter you want the front where your injector is going to go which is roughly 16.2 millimeters. That's what I’ve been using and it's working really well so that's going to make this whole area here 16.2 millimeters and then my drill point I set to an angle and that way I can control how much penetration I get into my cavity. So if you look at the front here, that's going to shoot straight down there and I have a little opening and I have a little bit of an edge here.
So you can do it that way or the second way you can do it is you can set a counter bore and set that width to 16.2 and I can sit my main width to maybe 10 and you can see how it changes. Now my counter bore is where my injector is going to go and then this 10 millimeter gives me a slightly smaller sprue that I can pump all the way through there if I want to. It's really up to you, I haven't found that much of a difference and I tend to use just the straight through 16.2 on these smaller molds. I’ll use the counter bore and the smaller midsection there on multi-cavity molds, but on these little guys I like to keep it relatively simple. The main control here is this, I just pull it back and forth until we are into the cavity. I’m into the cavity but I’m not blowing up the face, if I go too far back I’ll blow up the face and I just eyeball it. Then as always, we want to click this edge here and we're going to add a fillet and let's make this fillet 1.5 millimeters. That's just going to add a little edge here and make it a little bit easier to pump it in there.
Alignment/Bolt Holes
So now I have my sprue hole and my cavity so I can actually get plastisol into my mold. The next step I usually like to do now put in my holes for my bolts. What I’ve been using is M5 bolts. With M5 rivet nuts and the bolts you can do two things, you can use the bolts plus the rivet nuts to actually hold it together or you can use just the bolts without the nuts for alignment. Usually, I do a combination of the two. So I’ll put some bolts in with the rivet nuts to hold half of the mold in place and then I will put the bottom half with just the bolts into a vise. Now is when you need to decide where you're going to split and again we chose a round lure here so it doesn't really matter which direction. I’m going to split this one from top to bottom along the red plane. I’m going to use this plane right here to do my split so I’ll have a top and a bottom.
So what we want to do is then make sure our bolts go through that area. So I’m going to come over here and looking at the top now, I’m going to create a sketch. I’m going to create it on the top part of my mold so I click there and now what I want to do is create some circles and these circles are going to be five millimeters in diameter. M5 bolt is a 5 millimeter bolt, it doesn’t really matter at this point since you can do whatever size you want. By matching it to your bolt size you can get an idea of whether you have enough space or not, so five millimeter if you were using quarter 20s you'd want to do quarter inch.
Now I want to create a rectangular pattern and I’m going to select my circle. We’re going to go over here now I only need two of these so I change this number to two and then I push it down here and let's do five. The more holes we have here the more we'll save resin but obviously you don't want too many that would impact a lot of different stuff on your mold. Now hit enter and this is where all my holes are going to go and then we're going to finish sketch. We're going to use a different mode so I’m going to click hole I’m going to select that face that I just drew all those circles on and it's going to put a hole there but I want to come over to my hole tool and click sketch multiple holes. It's going to ask me to select the sketch points so I just come in here and click on all of these sketch points.
Now remember, I said I was using M5 bolts so there's a cool feature here in Fusion 360 that I can actually size these holes to the size of the bolt I’m using. The first thing I want to do is create a hole type.
I want a countersink because I have countersink bolts hole type. As soon as I hit clearance, this other area opens up down here and I have ANSI metric in profile which is metric and I have flathead machine screws which I bought. The size I select is M5 fit. I can do normal, I can do close, I can do loose normal. Loose normal usually works for me if you want to get picky you can go close. What you want to make sure you’re getting is enough depth so if I go to the right hand side I just want to pull these all the way through. Click ok.
Venting the Back
Now we have our holes we have our sprue and now we need to work on one of the vents. So I find the back and I’m going to put an air vent on this tail section. I find the air vent to be easier to do at this point than at the next point where we're going to be adding more air vents. So create a new sketch at the back and I’m going to select this back face. I’m going to draw a circle right in the center and I’m going to make it 0.5 millimeters and that's a size that has worked really well for me, it's always a balance between getting the air out and not letting the plastisol go through. One millimeter is too big you'll get lots of little tails and it doesn't hold the plastic. 0.5 millimeter seems to work best. I click finish sketch and I want to extrude this guy and just run it back in until you can see here. It turns into this circle that's going through that ball there. It doesn't matter which way you go through but you just want to make sure you go through and make sure it's set to cut and then click okay. Now I have a nice vent hole there.
Splitting the Mold
Now we're going to get to the fun part. I just clicked home, now we're going to split this in half and that's relatively simple. I just come up here and click split body. Body to split is my mold, my splitting tool this is where I’m going to select this plane in here but as you can see I can't get through there. I come over here and uncheck that eyeball and then come in here and select this plane. Come back in here turn that body back on and click ok. Now I have two parts, mold and mold 1. This is why I named it early on because it saves you a bunch of typing before now. What I do now is I come in here click on that bottom part, I’m just going to label it B for bottom and then when I put a T in there for top. This kind of organization helps me later when I’m coming through and making STL files.
Venting the Rest of the Mold
Now we need to finish up the venting and this is a new trick I’ve learned that seems to work pretty well.
Especially when you have a curly or any master with a lot of detail like this, you don't want to come through and make little holes. So what we're going to do is make a small cut out around the edge of the cavity to absorb the air and then vent that cavity. So I’m going to go to the top view and I’m going to turn off my top mold so it doesn't really matter what side you do this. Now I want to create a sketch on this plane right here you can see I have halves now that I put this hole in here so I click that. Now we're going to use our old friend projects include we're just going to do project include and click project we're going to click here all right and say okay.
Now I have all of these lines in here and then I’m going to create an offset, so from the modify menu offset I can click on this line and it defaults to positive. I actually want negative and we're going to do negative 1.5 and that's why you can see my red line here. Now I have this line here and what I want to do now is I don't want to take this whole area down and I just want this area in here in order for Fusion 360 to work. I need to block that off so I come in here create a line and I’ll come to the back and just click here and come across.
What I’m doing here is I’m creating the borders of my edge and I think it'll make a lot more sense when we go to the next step. So I’m going to click there and go across to their. So now I’m going to hit the escape key so now you can see that I have just this section here. If I mouse over it, it highlights that so that means that's a fully enclosed section which is exactly what I want. I'm going to finish this sketch and I’m going to go do the same thing on the other side. Now you can see I have this little outline section and all we're going to do is extrude these down. So I click extrude and I come in here and I collect click this side and collect this side so I do both at the same time. Now I want to go down so I’m going to type in negative and I think you know -1.5 is probably too much. I'm going to get flashing all around. The typical vent hole is 0.5 and so we're going to stick with that. Now you can see I’ll click ok and that's going to cut this little section here around my mold and that's where my air can go. So again we're going to have hot plastisol shooting down here pushing down, this whole thing is filled with air and it's got to go somewhere so you can go out the back quickly and then it's going to follow into this cavity.
So the next thing we need to do is get this air out of this cavity. This again is the same thing we did last time. I’m going to turn back on my top here and we're going to come over and I’m going to create a sketch and put it on any of these outside areas here. I'm going to draw circles and we can come in now and I put them right on the center line. You can go below if you want to but I think they work just fine here and again 0.5 is my standard. I’m going to create another rectangular pattern and just pull it down and again you're just going to have to play with your mold to see how many of these you actually need. I probably need at least four here if I ended up with one right in the middle of the screw hole, it wouldn't matter too much because again that will vent air just as well as anything else but just line them up to where they're not running against anything you don't want to run them into.
I’m going to click on finish sketch. So now I click extrude and I have to select these profiles. You can see since I did it on the line I have two halves. A trick here is to select the bottom one first then the top one because if I select the top one sometimes the bottom one is hard to click. Select them all and we're just going to drag them all the way across. We click ok. Now again if you want to do more vent holes you can but I think what I have is pretty good but you can have too many. We are all set, all's left to do is export this to STL and print it.
Export to STL and Printing Tips
So to do that you just come over here to each mold part, right click save as STL. This little dialog pops up and I don't change anything in here. High is fine, I think you can get away with medium but I always choose high refinement. Click on ok and then it's going to ask you where you want to save that and you save it to wherever you want to save it and then we slice it and we go from there. Let's go do that real quick.
So this is lychee slicer, the slicer I use. You might use G2 box it's going to be pretty much the same for what we're doing here today. I’m just going to get my STL files that I saved on my desktop and bring them in. I’m selecting both of them and dragging them in here. There's two ways you can really print these molds- sideways or vertically. So I’m just using the rotate onto plate method here so if I print them sideways, this will be the shortest time to print. If I click estimate print time its two hours and 10 minutes but that's an estimate, it's realistically going to take more like four hours. You tend to have more print failures this way than if you rotate them vertically. You can position wherever you want to and you want to make sure you have enough vertical height here. For me, at least, this method produces the best prints but if I estimate print time it's seven, almost eight hours. That's the trade-off you run into.
If this is a prototype, and it's actually going to turn out like I want to I might print them sideways but really I’ve had a lot more failures that way. Again, it's a balance; do you want to try to print it quickly knowing that it might fail or print it this way and know that you're not only going to get the best results but you're going to get the highest success rate. The reason for that is when you print them sideways, you're actually putting a lot of pressure on the edge because there's so much volume when it's pulling away from the fat that it has a tendency to pull and separate from the build plate. There's different ways you can fix that, you can up your exposure time on your base layers but then the problem you run into is it becomes really difficult to get unhooked from the build plate. So this way, again, it takes the longest but it is the most success rate and the highest quality.
If you missed anything there are markers down below. Links to anything I talked about, the printers I use, the resin I use to make these molds, the M5 bolts and the rivet nuts I talked about are all down in the video description.
