Improving...

Put in a little practice today with the delta hog mold. I purchased some additional colorant and flakes as well so I wanted to work on some recipes for popular colors that have worked well for me in the past.

Recipe: watermelon
4oz. Plastisol
16 drops watermellon
1 drop black
Green flake

I was quite happy with the results of this recipe, and actually the first shit filled completely and molded nice. I noticed the color was a little on the light side for my likening, so I added 5 more drops of watermelon and 5 more drops of black. This really darkened the worm closer to what I wanted to see.

I was able to mold 7 worms and 2 grubs with only 4 ounces of plastisol.

I do need make some improvements to the hand injector nozzle and the sprue on the mold. I have a taper on the inside of the nozzle and the plunger of the injector is flat. This is not going to work in a production scenario. After each shot, the are in between the plunger and the taper would hold the plastic and it would cool clogging the injector. The plunger and the taper are going to have to shut off to keep this from happening. The front of the nozzle needs to be changed as well, I want to create a taper instead of the straight diameter and redesign the sprue on the mold to match this taper. This should improve the overall molding process.

New relationship

Have not had a lot of time this week to work on any new designs or molds, but I do have a little news to report. I was contacted by someone who was interested in my work here, and would like to work together to produce some two piece injection molds for some baits that he has designed. I am pretty excited about this new venture, and cant wait to get started. He has some great design and will be doing the mold design, while I will do the programming and machining of the mold to his specifications.

I also have been researching bench top CNC mills on the internet. This has always been something that I have wanted to get, but have never really had a "product" to manufacture. hopefully this will turn into something that will allow me to purchase something like this, http://www.smithy.com/index_inside.php?id=996 , soon. Having a
CNC mill at home would be awesome, and would more than likely make my wife happy, even though she does not think so, because it would get me out of her hair, lol.

I also emailed fishermans warehouse in Sacramento, Ca., asking about what I need to do to get some molds and or worms into their store. I have not had a response as of yet, but will be patient.

So, hopefully soon I will posting pictures and comments from the project mentioned above.

Banned from tackleunderground.com

lol, I got banned from a lure making and bass fishing forum today. I guess the administrators if the site did not like my posts of my molds and worms. I was getting some good feedback and comments from some of it's members, but I guess if you make any type of comment about how strict they about what you can and cannot post they insta ban you.

I had posted a couple of pics of my latest 2 piece injection mold and the finished product, and the moderator told me that they had specific galleries for such posts and deleted my post. Then I posted a comment telling the moderator how I thought it was unfair and they shouldn't be so strict.....insta ban. No warning, no 2 day ban, insta permanent life time ban, wow.

www.tackleunderground.com moderators, you suck.

That is all.

Success

Finally after many design changes, additions, hypothesis's and theories, I have finally successfully molded my Zoom Brush Hog replica I call the "Delta Hog". I was so happy to see the worm fully formed as I opened that mold for the first time. This is truly my first attempt using the injection molding process, as well as my personally designed and built hand injector and two piece aluminum mold.

If you have been following or read my very last post, I redesigned my hand injector to this current version (pics below). It is a basically the same design, just a little bit smaller, and with a different tip, thanks to some advice from a couple of members from the http://www.tackleunderground.com/ forums. I still believe there can be some tweaking in this area as my design worked but was not that easy. I probably need to design a tip and sprue to be universal and I will probably increase the runner a small amount, as well as make the hole in the nozzle of the injector to match the runner.

Overall, I am happy with the outcome, I cant wait to try them out in the delta ASAP. I will be sending some out to friends and family in different parts of the country to see how they work for them, as soon as I get some more colorants and inject some more. I am currently shopping around for colorants and glitter and possibly some scents, so, if you have a trusted source, that has the best prices, please let me know here.

Now, to the good stuff, the pictures.

The new hand injector.

The new Delta Hog 2 piece injection mold in 6061 aluminum.

The result

Up close




The recipe I started with:

150 ml MF plastisol
10 drop root beer colorant
5 drops green colorant
red flake
gold flake

For the hog in the back, I added 6 more drops of green colorant, turned out pretty good I thought.

Thanks again to my friends and family for thoughts and advice given to help me out.

Next up..... The 6" Senko.

Made my first hand injector

Worked thru my lunch and breaks today to design and build my first hand injector. Basically just used what I had in the bottom of my toolbox, and engineered it on the fly, and assembled on my break. Testing to be performed Monday with the new 2 piece "Hog2" injection mold.

hog2

After the failure of the first attempt using the 2 piece mold for "delta hog", I have received a lot of useful information and advice from a few friendly members of www.tackleunderground.com and my co-worker and friend Dirk H. I have tried to incorporate the information I received and some of injection molding principles that I have learned over the years into a the next mold I will build. 

Included in the changes I have made to the new design, I scaled the overall size of the worm up by 25%, which increased the overall length from approximately 4 inches to just a little over 6 inches, as well as all the other features of the worm. I changed the design of the "legs" on this worm too, I basically changed it from a straight leg to more of a willow leaf shape. I also added vents to all features of the worm that will let air that is trapped in the cavity when the mold is closed, escape during the filling of the mold. Redesigning the "runner" to fill the mold was based on a hand injector that I will be using for the plastic. I am in the market for a proper aluminum hand injector, but they seem a bit expensive for what they are. I am hoping to design and build my own injector in the near future, but for now I think the one I have will work at least for testing. I still would like to build this mold out of clear acrylic, so that I could visually seem whats really going on. 

I am very hopeful this time I will be able to mold the Delta hog successfully and get some out in the water and to some of my friends for testing. Also feel free, to comment, give advice, at anytime, I have still learning here and appreciate any information.

First 2 piece mold

I finally was able to some machining done on my first 2 piece mold design for my "brush hog" replica. I decided to try and use black delrin to machine the cavity into this time, just because I could decrease the machining time by half compared to aluminum. I include a short "runner" at the top of the mold to fill the cavity. Overall I am very happy with the way the cavity and runner turned out.

The recipe:

100ml plastisol
10 drops motoroil
3 drops green
Gold flake
Red flake

Pretty disappointed with the results of the performance of the mold. I just could not get it to fill. I tried to pour slow, I tried to pour fast, neither method was successful a filling the entire cavity. Each attempt only filled the the main body, the "arms", the "legs" and a very small portion of the tail of the hog. I also found that the worm would not release from the mold as easily as it would from the aluminum molds previously used. My fix for the sticky problem, that's right, cooking oil spray. This actually worked well, but did not aid in the filling of the cavity. Next I tried to open the runner diameter from 1/4 inch to 3/8 inch, no change. I tried to drill a 1/4 inch hole on the back of the mold through to the cavity body, and tried to fill the cavity with the mold laying horizontal instead of vertically, no changes.

Now, I am little frustrated at this point, I think mostly because I had very high hopes for this process, and for it to fail so miserably, is very disappointing. I remind myself that this is how R&D works and to not give up, and learn from mistakes, analyze the situation and come up with some improved processes and develop better ideas. I think that I am trying to be too precise with my designs, too much detail. Or maybe the size of the extremities on the worm are just too small to fill properly, I designed the worm with an overall length of about 4 inches, I think I need to go bigger, bigger legs, arms tail, everything. The other thing I think I need to change is the delivery of the plastic to the cavity. I need some sort of injector, I think. Something that will inject plastic quickly, and with some pressure.

I continued to pour the reaming plastic in the 1 piece aluminum molds that I had previously made, so that I could get a good look at the color scheme and the flake distribution in the plastic. This I am very pleased with! The color is awesome, and I do not think the photos give it justice. Out of direct sunlight the worm appears to be a dark, mossy, green color with dark red flakes. But in direct sunlight, the craw is a medium brown and transparent gold, with bright reflective gold and red flake. This is definitely a keeper recipe.

My first 2 piece mold, made from Delrin.

First pours from new 2 piece mold (FAIL).