All Weather Bait Container

A colleague of mine really REALLY loves fishing.

One problem he often encounters in the winter is that the type of bait he needs often freezes too quickly when ice fishing. He asked me to try making his design for a bait container that he can use in the winter. I loved the idea - cause I also like fishing :)

This container is multi-purpose because you can put a heating pack in the bottom portion to keep your special bait warm in winter, a freezing gel pack to keep special bait cool in summer (or just put two different bait in the sections like minnows and wax worms) then also has a glow in the dark lid for low light fishing.

The most important thing you need for this a 3D printer. The other things are quite optional

Materials

1. Modeling Clay
2. Orange PLA Filament
3. Hot Hands Heating Packs
4. Glow in the Dark PLA Filament

Tools

1. Sand Paper
2. Thermo Probe

Sketches and Clay models allowed me to go back and forth with my friend and turn the idea in his head into a basic design with good measurements and be able to show him what the final puck will look like once we 3D print it.

• Use drawings and sketches to help figure out what the design should look like and what you want

• Use a 3D modeling program to also make digital prototypes to get a good representation (I have a custom program I wrote for this)

• Use modeling clay to bring your design to life and see what the size might be before 3D printing

For this simple project, you can use Fusion 360 but I preferred Tinker CAD cause we had to iterate a couple of times and I wanted more rapid prototyping. Its also more visual for explaining to a friend as I am modeling. Its also super easy to make a bait puck in Tinker CAD. (A Really good video I recommend for threads is this one)

• In a new Tinker CAD project, just make a simple cylinder, combine it with a smaller internal cylinder that is set to "hole" to make the base. A lid would simply be a smaller cylinder that goes on top. Resize these based on your agreed upon measurements from the previous section.

• To add threads, select "ISO Metric Thread" from the "Shape Generators" and you can use these to add threads to your puck. I would recommend resizing the threads and adding a cylinder in the middle to make the minor diameter thicker. Male threads can be added to the lid by simply resizing the thread to your liking and combining it to the top. Female threads can be made by copying the male threads, setting them to hole and combining them with the base.

• From that basic design, you can then tweak it to your liking based on your measurements and needed design tweaks. Additionally, a program like fusion 360 might be better for making better threads than the ones Tinker CAD makes which are better for rapid testing but not longevity.

For our design, we went with a 3'' puck with 3 different parts: A top lid, middle section to hold bait, bottom section to hold hot hands heating packs to keep the bait warm. We also made it a lot smoother and printed it off to see what it would look and feel like.

We also wanted to make sure that the walls were thick and hollow to provide insulation using air so set infill to 10% and made it using tri-hexagons or tetrahedrons (i.e. any structure that will trap air in "pockets" as it prints)

At this point, just take your 3D printer and 3D models and print the puck using standard PLA. We used the following settings:

Infill%: 10%

Supports: Yes

Build Plate Adhesion: Yes

Resolution: 0.2mm

Infill Pattern: Tri-Hexagon (Pick any that traps air well in pockets)

If needed, you can also run temperature testing on the puck. For this, we simply inserted a thermometer at the top of the puck and monitored the change in temperature over time. You could put the puck in a chilled container and see how well the insulation keeps it's temperature steady.

For my friend's design, he wanted the bottom to hold a hot hands heating pack (or cooling gel) and it was able to maintain a steady temp for at least 6 hours on both which is pretty good for a fishing trip.

Lastly, once you have the final design and tweaks decided on, we chose to make the lid glow in the dark so that you could find it at night when you go ice fishing or just other times of the year. Also changed the main material to orange so it was more high vis and less likely to get dirty than the white PLA we were testing with.

And that's it. Happy fishing!