Curly Tail Leg Worm
September 14, 2020
Curly Tail Leg Worm
This is a Curly Tail Worm design and it is the first mold I started to design back in September of 2019. I ran into some issues so it got put on the back burner for about a year though.
I designed this as a master mold box in CAD for pouring silicone type molds after watching Revamped Outdoors videos on YouTube and seeing how he went about things. I started out with a pretty basic curl tail design worm and added some thin legs to the body section of the worm.
The master mold box printed pretty well and I was very happy with how my first mold box came out.
I didn’t have any silicone at the time and being impatient and not wanting to wait and order some I figured I could try using this 4 year old Smooth Cast 300 that I had laying around. I figured this stuff sets rock hard so it would be fine for an injection type mold.
After mixing up my first batch of the 300 I started to pour the first half of the mold… at this point it started setting up even before I finished pouring it. It left a big blob on the back side of the mold and the heat from the curing process warped the 3D printed mold box. This piece was pretty much garbage at this point so I reprinted the master mold box and ordered some Mold Max 60 silicone that Elliott from Revamped uses. While waiting for the silicone to arrive it was at this point in time I decided to just try 3D printing the actual molds themselves. That process turned out to work so well I abandoned the master mold box way of doing things and moved onto just printing molds all the time.
September 2020
Jump forward a year to September 2020 and I decided to give the Smooth Caste 300 process a try again just to finally use the stuff up and get these mold boxes off my bench. This time I screwed the 3D printed mold to a piece of plywood in the hopes that it would keep things straight and level.
I mixed up the 300 and poured it into the mold box as fast as a could not worrying about slow pouring to eliminate bubbles. I just filled the box as fast as I could.
This GIF is a time lapse the shows the now 5 year old Smooth Cast curing in about a minute and a half.
Both mold halves actually came out but they are kind of a train wreck and are pretty thin but should still work.
I did have to destroy the mold boxes to remove the mold halves though. (I forgot mold release on one half but it still came out with a little bit of a fight.)
Here you can see how thin they are. I only had once piece of plywood so I clamped it up pretty hastily as best I could.
The first injection worked but there was a lot of flashing… I definitely need to clamp this up better next time.
Overall with a little clean up they came out looking pretty good. The extra flash on the little legs gives them a fuzzy look.
Here’s how they look in the water, they kind of have a Hellgrammite feel to them. (that was a lucky coincidence though as I had never heard of a Hellgrammite at the time I designed these.
Overall I’m happy with how they came out and that I finally finished one of my first designed molds. I need to shoot a few more to see if I can eliminate some of the flashing and maybe someday I’ll actually get around to fishing with these.
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