Hand Crafted Angling

No seriously. Idk if anyone else had these as a kid but the material would be perfect for making soft plastic lures.

Interesting the molds I have are usually 5-10 minute demold times depending on size

I’m just curious how long you guys normally have to wait to demold your baits. I’ve only shot molds I resin 3d printed myself and I’ve never owned an aluminum one. I would imagine aluminum would cool off the plastic quite a bit quicker.

I appreciate all the help I’m gonna do some testing and see if it works. My plan is to resin 3d print a hollow air chamber attatched to the lure lip and then cast the alumilight around it. I will share in greater detail if it works out.

I greatly appreciate your help I will definitely use your recipe as a starting reference. I think I came up with a workaround for the lip and weighting problem but that gonna require a bunch of testing on my part. If all goes well I should be able to have transparent molded in lips along with ballast.

Thank you you make a great point of changing up the design process to suit the method. For making the mold I see no issue with just printing out a mold with the cad file I already made. It might be easier if I use a flexible plastic but that shouldn’t be an issue. Casting everything in one shot would definitely save me a ton of time. I guess I would just have to figure out the lips and ballast. For ballast I would rather cast it inside than drilling and filling holes. I’m sure I can figure out a way to suspend it inside. That would just leave the lip. I don’t really have the space to add a bandsaw to my shop it’s pretty tight as it is. The lip on that bait now is pretty thick as I had to beef it up in order to survive dropping. I wonder how it would hold up out of the resin but I’m guessing the only way to find that out is to test it.

Yes I am definitely interested if you don’t mind the hassle. This is one of the finished baits I make currently. Picture is of an older version new lip is thicker. Comes in at just over 7” and about 3.5oz. I wonder if it would be possible for me to cast the bait in two halves and epoxy them together kind of like I’m doing now. That way I can keep my rattle chamber and don’t have to figure out how to make a wire harness with ballast. I was hoping I can add an offset lip around the entire body for easy alignment.

Yeah that’s what I liked about the 3d printed lips is you can do custom shapes rather than just a flat piece of plastic. I might have to give the resin a try. What’s your guys adverage cost per lure body for a larger bait?

Instersting never really gave the resin much thought. Are you guys making the diving lips out of it too?

Yeah I have a few different baits that I am happy with the way they swim with a few more coming up the r&d ladder. I really started building baits because I wanted stuff that just didn't exist. I'm just trying to increase the ease of assembly on myself and maximize strength. I'm at the point now where I am happy with look and action I want to start doing some very small scale runs. Nothing commercial just enough for me and my buddy's to have a good time with. I already kind of went down the rabbit hole of the commercial to no avail. I was looking at the small production injection molding machines and although there are some cheaper hobby ones none are capable of doing what I want. So I am basically just trying to maximize what I can do with the machine I already have.

When I started learning how to use a 3d printer and learn how to make my own lures I had a goal in mind. I wanted my baits to be as close to a store bought lure as possible. I’ve been trying to keep the internals the same to mimic it. So far I’ve been adding ball bearings as weights inside the bait. To my knowledge most of the higher quality baits are made out of poly carbonate. I’ve mimicked this as best as I could by using a blend of polycarbonate. Although you can 3d print with it my printer doesn’t have the ability nor is it really viable cost wise at this time for my application. Instead of gluing the halves together I’ve moved onto solvent welding. I believe this is the process used by professional lure makers. I’ve also moved on to using figure 8 hook hangers. This seems like the most common method of hook and line attachment. Unfortunately I think I’ve hit a wall here. 3d printing has limitations with not only strength but tolerances and the required support structures. I was wondering if anyone here had experience making injection molded baits that could help me out. I was wondering how thick the walls are in general on commercially made baits. I would like to see how close to that I can get away with. I’m sure it’s a crapshoot and all proprietary info but if someone had some pictures of an unassembled bait that would help me immensely. I’m assuming commercially made baits have some sort of alignment system with a male and female half. Unfortunately this may be hard for me to implement so far I’ve just been using the hook hangers as alignment pins.

I run an ended 6 now. So it is a stock enclosed printer. I did a few prints on my ended 3 with no warping but I’m not sure how a lure would work out with no enclosure.

I highly recommend this fillimate. It’s a poly carbonate petg blend that prints like petg except much stronger. I make all my hardbaits out of it. I also prototype all my soft plastics in it as it can handle the heat and is much cheaper than resin. Can’t beat the price either. https://www.amazon.com/Transparent-Filament-Dimensional-Accuracy-Polycarbonate/dp/B075SY4YRD/ref=mp_s_a_1_7?crid=5YF49QRNN9Z7&keywords=polycarbonate+filament&qid=1690203804&sprefix=polyca%2Caps%2C167&sr=8-7

I kind of do that. I print the lure in 2 equal haves. I use figure 8 hook hangers for attaching hooks and line. These are the same used in commercial lures and they act like alignment pins. For glue I would try resin welding. If you can get the whole joint to cure it should be much stronger.

I never made it to far with the resin printed lures. Any resin at a reasonable price point was to brittle for my liking. Regular airbrush paint should be fine but for a clearcoat I would definitely do something that blocks uv. The paint may I'm not sure but the longer that uv resin gets exposed to light the more brittle it gets. I use the chepo amazon craft resin for (not the printer kind) for my topcoats and it works out very well. I would also assume that since it absorbs uv light to cure it cant let much through.

Nice! Double hinge is something I’ve always wanted to try. It’s on my ever growing list of projects. I know they make these figure 8 pin hinges but I’ve yet to try it.

Looks awsome! What did you do for the hinge?

Glad you like it!

According to the video it should be very close to the z man stuff but there is almost no info out there. It also can’t be microwaved. I’m gonna pull the trigger soon and I’ll report back here. I just wanted to check first and see if anyone had an experience with it.

Yeah but once it’s on there it lasts longer than the jig. That’s the stuff I was talking about but it’s only $75 on their website.

I was wondering if anyone has tried the flex x 200 bait plastics makes recently. There is almost no information on their website and all of the posts on here are a few years old. From what I can gather it was a formula that was actively being worked on. I know there were some complaints about memory issues I was wondering if anyone got around them yet. They atleast fixed the price. It’s 75 bucks now instead of 120. It would be sweet to be able to make my own elastic style baits. Atleast in my experience they have always outfished regular plastisol.

Thanks for the input. I guess I’ll be mixing up some saltwater in the future. I wanted to make a relatively quick sinking lipless crank bait. I’m not thinking that would be too hard as the sink rate on that bait isn’t as important to me. I just want to be able to hit the depths I need to in a reasonable amount of time. On the other hand other bait might be a problem. I wanted to make a slow sinking twitch bait but that sink rate is gonna have to be more fine tuned. On top of that the areas I fish have pretty high fluctuations in salinity. It seems like my only option for that is those suspending strips.

Thanks man you too glad I could help

I got a few new saltwater baits I’m making but I’m wondering about weight. I only have experience with floating baits in the salt. I was wondering how much it really affects the sink rate. I’d rather avoid making the hour trek to the bay just to test it out. If I make somthing that’s slow sinking in freshwater it won’t suspend or turn into a floater is basically what I’m getting at.

I print it vertically you just have to sand down the elephants foot in the bottom. I know there is an elephants foot compensation setting but I’ve never bothered with it. Takes 5 seconds of sanding.