Soft Plastic Crayfish
January 18, 2020
Soft Plastic Crayfish
STL’s for this lure are available for purchase from Cults3d.com
This is my version of a Crayfish and it is another bait made from a 3D printed hand pour mold. This was my second attempt at doing 3D Printed molds for soft plastics.
The end portion of this video shows the pouring of the crayfish lure. (Click HERE to jump to the crayfish part.)
The design was done in Fusion 360 and is suppose to be a crayfish with it’s tail folded under itself. (The claws are repurposed from my hard crayfish bait.)
Here is the finished design of the mold.
This was the first printed rendition of the crayfish mold…
… and this was the very first pour. It came out ok all things considered but it did have a lot of flashing.
After a few tries I was getting better results.
The second rendition of the mold included a cavity for the actual jig head.
To make the cavity I used this little insert to form a hollow spot during pouring.
While the idea worked it wasn’t perfect as the area around the jig head was too thin.
The third rendition (printed in scraps) allowed me to pour the bait around the actual jig head.
Here you can see the inserted jig before pouring.
This method worked out quite well and enclosed the jig head fully this time. I still need to get these in the water to test them but that will not happen until next season.
This is what I was trying to replicate with the last bait.
I think the next thing I might try is to take a soldering iron and melt detail into the mold to create all of the raised spots on the claws.
The little embedded jig heads did work but had a tendency to spin on the retrieve so I’m now going to try a larger flipping jig head and see if that works better. (I stuck eyes on this one just for fun too.)
This is hopefully the final version… I made a custom lead tail jig head to use with these. Final testing is still needed.
All Information, Pictures, and Material is copyright © 2020 by Stephen Thone and may not be used for any personal or commercial purposes without the consent of the author. All rights reserved. The Author makes no guarantees or warranties as to the accuracy or completeness of, or results to be obtained from accessing and using the Information herein.