October 14, 2020

Mini Reapers

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

These are similar to some mini reapers I had back in the 90’s (at least from memory anyway). I added a wavy tail like I did on the Cuttlefish Reapers that I designed before.  This was just a quick design to test out a few different ideas and theories.

As with most of my designs it started out with a crude drawing on paper before getting into the CAD design.

Here is the basic design. It was pretty simple and only took a few minutes to CAD up.

Having confidence in the design I went with a 3 cavity mold right from the start and it’s still a small mold.

Here is the printed mold. A few of the things that I am testing are whether the fins will come out of the mold if they are not on the split line. This is something 3D printing is perfect for because I don’t think a mold such as this would be able to be machined like this.  (I’m trying this first to see if in the future I can make a four fin version out of only a two piece mold.) The other theory that I am testing is if using color filament for the mold affects the plastisol like I though it did on the ribbed worm I did last time.

Here is the first injection… the fins came out easy enough so that idea passed the test but I do think the plastisol was affected a little bit by the color of the filament used on the mold.  You can kind of see on the bottom reaper the half that came out of the red mold is a different color slightly. (it doesn’t show up to well in this picture though)

Here you can see the wavy fin better. I still have to test if the action of the tail works though. (Either way it will still be a killer bait like the originals.)

I did a second batch just to make sure I could repeat the removal process.  (you can see a slight red tinge to half the fins on these too.)

Now I just need to test them before running more injections.

The 8 cavity version… but haven’t tried printing it yet.

I also went I little crazy and designed a 16 cavity version too. Each half of this would take about 20-24 hours to print at my normal fine settings.  I might get around to trying it at a higher layer height to see if it works first.

Ultimately… this is the idea I had for the 4 fin version.

For now I’m working on making mini bullet head jigs to go along with the mini reapers.

Here is the finished mold read to make so jigs.

Fresh out of the mold.

Cleaned up and a real quick coat of paint. I should have powder coated them white before paint… Next time but for now these work.

Color matched as best I could.

Starting to stock pile a quick mini reaper kit together.

The printed version of the 8 Cavity mold.

I put together I nice little kit for myself.

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