July 22, 2019

3D Printed Wasp Lure

(STL files for these lures are available at Printables.com

This is my Wasp lure.  It was inspired by a post I saw on Instagram by Piotr Korol of korol_handmade_lures. I made this one to do some ultralight fishing for bluegill mostly but it should work for a variety of species.

I had a lot of fun doing the frog video so I did a full build video on this one too.

Every lure has to start with a design so using several wasp images from google I quickly sketched up the design on paper before moving into CAD to design the lure.

This lure is pretty small so printing it is pretty quick… around 20 minutes I think.

This was version 1… assembly is pretty straight forward on this one.

Comparing it to the original sketch.

Finished Version 1

The first tests of the wasp only produced a few fish (a bluegill) and this perch but it highlighted some shortcomings in the design.  The hook needs to be moved forward because while the lure drew a ton of hits I couldn’t get any positive hookups with it stationary and the strikes coming from below. Both catches were only obtained on the retrieve where the fish hit it from behind.  Back to drawing board to make some changes.

Version 2 (which the build video was based on) moved the hook to the middle of the lure…

… and produced a lot more fish. I caught over 2 dozen fish on day two of testing it.

Including this Bass which put up quite a good fight on the ultralight pole.

I know Wasp’s don’t do the whole flower thing but I was just having some fun while taking pictures.

The lure from day 1 testing lost the 3 right side legs after the first fish but otherwise held up pretty well.

The lure from day 2 managed to keep all the legs (I used more resin when attaching them) but one of the wings took a beating. I may have to explore some other ideas for wings. (Maybe printed versions?)

Here’s a few scaled down versions for fly fishing.  The small one lacks the buoyancy to float but will probably still slay some bluegill.

The fly version worked well too.

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