Fishing Lure Turning Wheel Build
- ncsinkers
- Mar 26, 2018
- 2 min read
I needed a lure turning - drying wheel for clear coating my lures. I saw that people had made good use of a rotisserie motor and right before picking one up my brain kicked in and I remembered I had an arduino kit I was tinkering around with in the past. The kit had a stepper motor and an ULN2003 driver board. The kit I purchased can be bought for roughly $35 (Elegoo Super Starter Kit) on Amazon. This kit has many other components not used here that could be useful for other projects or advancing this one. The arduino group is very open source community, therefore boards, software, examples are very abundant and very cheap. For example if you only wanted the Arduino board, stepper motor, and driver board, you could probably pick them all up on ebay for $10 or less with free shipping if you go with the Chinese special. I have a 3d Printer so I was able to print some of my components. This was definitely unnecessary as wood or other materials would work very well. The stepper motor had more than enough torque. People recommended powering it from a source other than your computer so I found an old supply with the correct connector and voltage in an old supply box.
Attached is a photo of the turning wheel which consists of a 1/2" Polycarbonate center rod with 1/4" polycarbonate inserts at each end. The plates on each side of the wheel were some leftover polycarbonate sheets from work that fit. The 1/4" tubing inserts at the ends of the center rod allow me to grab on to the wheel without stopping the motor. Since the inserts were not bonded to the center rod, slip could occur when the wheel was stopped. This wasn't planned but worked out well because sometimes you need a little extra time to work with a lure before it takes off. It would be a much better design if the two end supports were mounted to a base plate but this was my first shot at making one and this setup allows me to break things down easily for storage.

The arduino code etc. may seem overwhelming at fist but it is actually very easy. There are many youtube videos out there to show you how to connect the board and there is also code you can just download and run. Below is the youtube video I used to program the board for my turning wheel. I increased the delay time at the rotation stops to allow me to clip in a lure after clear coat dipping. The music in the video below is a little rough to deal with but I found this one to be very clear and it had the link to the downloadable code in the description. Potentiometers can also be used to drive the wheel speed but the basic setup in the video worked well for me.
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