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Very ironic thinking that custom cranks historically was modifying through weighting commercial baits differently to perform for specific presentations or better. In my opinion learn to weight is the only way to go if you want to be able to build a variety of lures for different presentations and conditions. Most cranks and/or top waters will not function optimally without it as you simply won't be able to get the distribution correctly for it to preform. Drop a dozen different style cranks in a bucket and you will see they all sit with a different attitude. Take the KVD 1.0 in your picture. Have you looked at the weight displacement on it? Part of the way that lure functions will be do its stance in the water and weighting is the key. If you took the weight after the hook hanger in the belly and move it to the weight infront how would that bait perform. Dive quicker, deeper, decreased side to side displacement, quicker shorter movement, etc.. How about we move the weight to the tail, no weight, put all the weight in top/back of the lure.. It all can change the performance of the same bait. You could print it more solid in areas and try to get it balanced correctly but going to be hard to do. Would be easier to print in halves and add weight and glue or print half add weight and continue printing. Or print solid bait and have chamber to drill into and insert weight and seal chamber with epoxy.

I fish Santee cooper where the big girls live.......8-9lbers are common in spring... have no issues..your drag should take care of the the amount of resistance a fish may have. Throw mine on 10lb-12lb fluoro have zero issues. At the end of the day it's balsa wood, it's weak......but so are Rapala lures

When I had a Lee pot I would get the lead hot then empty it. I cleaned it out then took steel wool and cleaned it as much as possible. Then I sprayed it with a good layer of WD40. I let is soak for a while then wiped it down, fired it back up, put lead in it and started over.

I had a pure resin ballast section of one of my designs from when I ran out of micro balloons pouring a batch. This gives an example of a bait being balanced without the use on conventional weighting. I reach my desired action through trying different levels of buoyancy with the main body resin micro balloons mix, the angle to pour the pure resin ballast and how much pure resin to use this just one way to do things

In my crankbait building, I've found it helpful to think of a crankbait's actions as wiggle, the X shaped movement of the lure's nose and tail as viewed from above, and wobble, the amount the bait moves/rolls from side to side as viewed from the front. The bigger the X, the wilder the bait's side to side action, and the bigger the wobble, the more water it displaces on the retrieve. I need to add ballast to all of my PVC trimboard lures to get them to swim right. I typically use a successful commercial crankbait as a model, floating it in my 5 gallon water bucket to see how it sits at rest. I add ballast to my lures to achieve that same "angle of attack", and then , once I've gotten a lure to duplicate the commercial lure's performance, experiment from there. I've found that adding my ballast at the belly hook hanger's location, and as low as possible, give my the widest wiggle (X ing) because both the nose and the tail are the lightest and easiest to move when they have no additional weight, other than the line tie/lip, and tail hook and hanger. It also produces the most stable lure, one that won't roll over no matter how fast I retrieve it. Splitting the ballast, and installing it in front of and behind the belly hanger, dampens the wiggle. The farther apart the weights are, the more they act to deaden the wiggle, because they become counterweights. I've found that the higher the ballast is in relation to a line from the line tie to the rear hook hanger, the more the lure wobbles. In my crankbaits, I still put the majority of my ballast weight at the belly hook hanger, but I've found that by moving up to a third of the ballast weight about that line tie/rear hanger line, I can get more wobble in an otherwise stable lure. I'm afraid you'll have to just try stuff to really learn how to ballast whatever lure you're making. Of course, if you're smart like Dave, you can figure it out as you design your lure on the computer. I've never been able to do that, so trial and error has been my method. Everything I know about lure building I've learned here on TU, from people like Bob P and Dave, who have shared with me, and from just trying stuff to see how it works. Good luck, and let us know how you progress.

The hooks are a part of the ballast weight system, so yes, you may get away with no lead inside the body. It all depends on the size of the lure and the width of the body. If you are 3D printing then presumably your lure is designed on CAD. This gives you an advantage to get the lure balanced correctly before you even switch on the printer. You can model every piece of the hardware and assign materials to all the parts. You can calculate whether the lure sinks or floats and by how much. You can even calculate how the lure sits in the water. Dave