Febuary 5, 2019

Crayfish Lure

This is the design of a crayfish lure I am currently working on.  I’ve been wanting to make a crayfish crankbait for awhile but it took awhile to figure out how I was going to design it where it looked somewhat realistic and swim backwards too. The body of the lure was designed in Solidworks and was as close as I could get it to looking like a crayfish body but still keep it lure like.  The claws/arms were sculpted in Fusion 360 and came out  a lot more realistic looking. If this works out I may go back and sculpt the body in Fusion too.

I’m not sure if it’s going to work as a crankbait with the arms being joined to the body but if not it should work as a jig anyway. I’ll need to do a lot of testing before I figure out which direction to go next.

I also haven’t figured out if I’m going to do a single hook or use a treble hook as shown above.  I have to finish up a few things on the design and then start printing some prototypes to test out.

I started by printing the claws just to see if they would actually work and how they would come out.  The printed out great, they are about 2.5″ long so the lure will be a bit larger than I envisioned but I can always scale it down if needed.

I’m using these safety wire pliers to form the hardware needed to hinge the arms to the body.

These things a easy to use… you just clamp the wire in the pliers, wrap it around a shank of the size you want the loop (a 6d nail in this case) and pull the knob of the back of the pliers and it automatically forms the perfect twist and loop.

Here are the perfectly formed loops. These will be one half of the hinge on each arm. I’ll probably use a sinker eye for the other half.

The loops fit into slots that were designed into the end of the arms and will be glued in place.  So far the arms/claws came out great and should work out well. Next I have to finish the design on the body and then print that out next and go from there.

Here’s the first print of the body. It’s just taped together for now I need to make a few tweaks so the hook fits and then see how it floats in the water.

To be Continued……………

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