This video is the start of a video series in which I will make a custom bass jig from scratch. I will be designing and fabricating the jig from the ground up. Using only a jig hook, a fiber weed guard and a skirt collar I will try and replicate a common largemouth bass jig in the football head style.

If you are curious to see the fishing videos referenced during the introduction of this video you can find them here:

   • Bass fishing the Mississippi river Day 1  

   • Original soft plastics catching fish?...  

I will be using Autodesk Fusion 360 to design the mold that will house the weedguard and the hook where I will then pour in a two part urethane plastic around bird shot to create a pseudo lead head design. The jig will be designed with a plastic keep that will hopefully help hold on a soft plastic trailer that I have previously designed (in other videos on this channel).

I will also make my own skirt material out of a two part silicone and cut the skirts with a homemade skirt cutting tool. Using rotary blades I will cut skirts with a multi tool that I have designed in Fusion 360 and printed on the Anet A8 3D printer. The skirt material will also be pigmented using different pigments in the slicpig line of Smooth-on pigments (not sponsored). I will also be designing a skirt threading tool that will allow the skirt band to be placed over the skirt material before threading the whole jig skirt on to the jig itself.

I have had a lot of success catching largemouth and smallmouth bass with a skirted weedless bass jig presentation in the past and I constantly lose them in snags where hard to reach big bass live. I decided to design this mold (mould) in Autodesk Fusion 360 because I was sick of paying premium prices for something as simple as a reaction based fish presentation.

I will be pouring these jigs with a two part urethane from Smooth-on called SmoothCast 300 series which cures extremely fast in about 10 minutes and allows the mold to produce multiple jigs very quickly. I also modified the mold after the prototype worked so well, I made it into a 3 cavity mold which allows for greater production of the lures.

Overall I think the 3D printed space will greatly help custom lure makers by decreasing the amount of prototyping and time spent during design. I have been very pleased with the results I have been able to achieve in just a short time making custom lures with a 3D printer.