Hey all! A couple of friends and myself are looking at starting a soft plastics lure company, although mostly just for fun. Neither of them have much experience with lure making, but I’ve been making hard baits for years so naturally it fell on me to come up with the molds, and designs, with insight from them. We decided to start with stick baits, but I’ve ran into a handful of issues that i was wondering if anyone here would be able to help me out with. I’ll try and break down our goal, my process, and issues as well as I can.
The goal: a 2 piece injection mold capable of producing quality soft baits relatively quickly. I’m opposed to using a pre made mold, because I want what we make to be unique, and want to avoid any sort of intellectual property rights issues or anything like that that could come from using someone else’s product for our production.
The process: I started by making a stick bait master out of a wooden dowel rod. Once I had this the way I wanted it, I inset it in modeling clay, added indexing marks, and created a mold box. Next I used Alumilite high strength 2 to create a pour in style mold to create copies of the master. Then I made another mold box, set in the copies of the master, added a sprew, gates, and indexing marks, and used Vac Master 50 to get the final injection mold.
The issues: the main issue that I’ve run into so far is that the final vac master 50 mold, after removing the masters, is extremely porous and cracked, and almost looks like wet concrete. By no means usable even if just for ourselves. I let each half cure for 6 hours before proceeding, and used mold release each time.
I found this out when I went to my buddys house to shoot our first baits. When we found out that the injection mold wouldn’t work, we decided to use the pour in style mold to run some baits to mess around with colors, salt content etc. Go figure this didn’t go according to plan either, our baits came out incredibly soft and stretchy. We were using medium plastisol 212, heated to 325 on a hot plate, stirring consistently, poured into the high strength 2 mold, and let to cool for 15 minutes (until the excess in the beaker cooled and stiffened up). We tried it with salt and without salt and found no major differences. Is this just how plastisol is? Are we’d doing something wrong? In my mind I was aiming more for of a Yamamoto style consistency, but really I wasn’t sure what to expect.
I’m going to get a different mold release for the vac 50, and I even tried brushing the first layer on thinly. Brushing it on helped slightly, but it was still way too porous. As far as the bait plastics, I have no clue. I’m also investing in a 3D printer this week which I’ll use for masters and eventually molds (even though I’d prefer the vac 50 for it’s aluminum content) once I figure out the right filament for molds
I’m also aware I didn’t leave a whole lot of border space on the 6 bait mold, but I was running out of clay and figured it’d be good enough for a test run
TL;DR
my vacmaster 50 molds are cracked and porous as all get out, and my plastisol even after letting cool for 30 minutes has the consistency of on of those stretchy sticky hands from middle school.
