April 13, 2020

3D Printed Grub Mold

STL’s for this lure are available for purchase from Cults3d.com

This is the basic Grub mold I made to show how I design a Multi cavity mold on YouTube.  I had some denting issues along the way but overall it worked well enough to produce some fishable grubs.

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Full Build Video

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This was the first printed version of the mold.

The first batch of grubs had a lot of denting (from shrinking) so I cut the tails off and tried to redo them as a multi-color lure. They still came out dented but are still fishable.

After a few more unsuccessful tries I went back and redesigned the mold a bit. I widened the front of the grub and made the injection gate a lot bigger so the shrinking plastic could be drawn in more from the runner.

Here is a comparison between the two designs.

The second batch came out a lot better and the wider front will allow for a better jig head fitment.  Overall these came out pretty well but I still did have some minor denting on a few.

Most of the colors where just various remelts from previous lures but I added some Lureworks holographic glitter to the plastisol and it really brought them to life. (they look a lot more amazing in person)

I did a bunch of aqua colored ones too.

I also did some more experimenting with dual color.

Which lead to these bumble bee ones which ended up being my favorites so far.

The mold did warp a little but I also did some crazy things trying to eliminate the denting.  I know aluminum molds dissipate heat better so I tried putting this in the freezer before injecting to see if that would help the lures cure faster. I don’t know if it helped as I did still get some occasional denting. This warping really doesn’t affect anything because it still clamps flat or I can just put it back on the heated printer bed for a few minutes and it flattens right back out.

Overall everything worked out pretty well… I still have to get these in the water but they should catch fish no problem.

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