September 3, 2020

No Frills Frog

This is my No Frill Frog. This was design from memory of a frog lure I had back in the 90’s that I can no longer remember the name of or find again.  It’s just a basic frog with no details, simple action, and 99.9% weedless design.

The basic design started with a simple drawing before starting in CAD.

After a little work in Fusion 360 here’s the finished body design with a quick 3D print to get a feel for the actual size of the bait.

The mold is printed in two halves that sandwich the hook in between the halves.  This will allow the hook to be embedded into the actual finished lure.

This quick test print to check hook placement shows how the worm hook used will be embedded into the lure.

The finished printed two mold halves.

Ready for some baits…

The hook just gets extended with a little wire to reach the front eye slot. This was just a quick test bend… I bend the wire in a cross shape now so the hook doesn’t rotate at all.

Here is the hook in the mold ready to be poured.

The first ones I did were made out of silicone with micro bubble added to get them to float. The first yellow one the legs were to thick to get any action out of them so I redesigned the mold to have thinner legs.

Unfortunatly even with the thinner legs the next one (green version) still didn’t have any leg action as they were too stiff.

I then tried adding microballons to a plastisol version but they came out ugly as hell.

The next ones I just used straight plastisol (floating blend) but they still didn’t float with the weight of the hook. It really doesn’t matter because of the shape of the body they still stay on the surface when retrieved.

This is how the lure sits in the water with the hook pointed up……

When a fish strikes the lure the hook is exposed and hopefully the fish is hooked.

The action wasn’t to bad on these and they did catch fish.

While they did work good the pickerel I was catching bit the legs off pretty easy if they didn’t strike the full body. I do want to try and make some more silicone ones but I need to either leave the microballons out or try a different silicone that is more flexible.

8-9-21 Update = Someone was finally able to identify the original lure and was nice enough to email me the info. (Thanks mrickert) It’s a Strike King Grass Frog and from the pictures about that I found on Google I wasn’t too far off on the design going from memory.   Now I just need to finally finish this project with a better material. 

To be continued…..

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