Fishing lures

[Columbo]

I am an absolute newbie to 3D printing. I have ordered a Creality CR-10S printer which I hope will arrive soon. One of the main things I wanted the printer for is fishing lures. I have seen a number of fishing lures on Thingiverse but what I want to do is model my own lures, so my question is, does anyone know of a step-by-step tutorial on how to model a fishing lure with perhaps Tinkercad or MatterControl or any other modeling software?


Thanks

[curious aardvark]

make a fishy shape and leave holes for attaching hooks :-)

They are mostly an offshape cylinder.
Just copy one and then modify as you like.

For this kind of thing, openscad and a set of digital calipers is what I use :-)

[Columbo]

Thank you very much for the reply. I will take a look at openscad. One of the things that I wasn't sure of is how you get the small hole through the center of the lure to run a wire through to attach the rings and hooks.

[curious aardvark]

the way I look at designing in openscad is i break everything down into basic shapes.
cubes, spheres, cylinders.
Each can be resized, rotated, added and subtracted from the others. Cylinders can also be tapered with different start and end diameters to make any kind of 'cone'.
You can also state the number of facets a cylinder or sphere has to form shapes with different numbers of sides: polygons ! (lol)

so for a lure you might have an elongated sphere for the 'head' with a slanted slot for the bit that makes it dive (created by subtracting a rotated thin cylinder or cube - or just adding a rotated cylinder) then a body made of tapered cylinders or reshaped spheres. You can add fins or slots for flexible fins by removing bits.
You then either have the body as a single module, or combine them with the 'union' command. And remove a long cylinder from the middle.

pretty simple really :-)

here's a selection of lures you can download and resize in your slicer for a quick way to start, it seems a fairly popular use for 3d printing :
https://www.thingiverse.com/search?q=fishing+lure

[Columbo]

Thanks again Curious Aardvark. I looked quickly at openscad and I got the impression that the majority of designing was done through coding where others like Tinkercad and MatterControl is a drag & drop type of program. As I said, it was just a very quick look at it and I may well be wrong on that. I will take a better look at it again. Just the same, the method that you suggested can be applied to any cad program.

I got notification yesterday that my 3D printed has shipped so I hope to get it soon in spite of the Christmas rush. Meanwhile I have to learn how to use one modelling program or another. Tinkercad looked fairly easy to learn but the problem with Tinkercad is that it does not produce Gcode. I guess I could produce an STL file, then load it into Cura and then generate the Gcode but that is adding an extra step. MatterControl will produce Gcode although it looks like it may have a bit of a higher learning curve. Someone suggested that I use Simplify3D and while it looks like a good program, it costs $149.00 USD which is $199.05 Canadian. I don't mind laying out the funds for a decent program but I feel that I should learn how to use these things first before laying out the funds.

I will try to look at those lures from Thiniverse but at some point i hope to design my own style lures.

Thanks again for the help. Very much appreciated.

[airscapes]

being able to design your own parts is very helpful, however, you have a lot on your plate leaning how to produce a quality part from you 3D printer and slicer. I am focused on mechanical parts and chose OnShape, however that is not really all that suited for what you are doing. Do some google searches as there are many sites that list 10 or more of the most popular CAD software and their pros and cons.Good luck!

[Columbo]

Thanks airscapes. I did look online and while there are a number of CAD programs out there, both free and paid, for learning purposes I think that Tinkercad or MatterControl may be the best choice since they seem to have the lowest learning curve. Once I get the hang of this 3D printing I will look at a better, and perhaps paid, software like Simplify3D or 360 Fusion. Right now my focus is on learning how to design some simple things like fishing lures and how to set up the printer to print them. I will, in all likelihood, be on this forum with a lot of questions as I try to learn

Thanks again.

[brendlo]

Any progress on this? Are you done with your fishing lure project?

[Columbo]

HI brendlo,

I decided to use Tinkercad to design a fishing lure and save it as an .STL file. Then I loaded the .STL file into Ultimaker Cura, set up the parameters for printing and saved the Gcode to my SD card. I have done two lures like this so far and they turned out pretty good considering that I am a newbie. Are you looking to do some fishing lures also?

[TommyDee]

You could consider getting good at MeshMixer and create organic shapes that way. Just saying. I do parametric CAD and I'd have a devil of time making nice organic features.
However, consider layer adhesion as your enemy when you have a fighting fish on. As you so correctly point out, you want the line going through the body, not depend on the plastic to hold your catch on the line! Be careful with kinks in the through-hole you need. MeshMixer does rudimentary merge functions and solids to manipulate.
I don't know who is pushing CAD seats for free these days. I pay out the ears for mine.