Tackle House; the house of firmly trusted lures in Japan

Firstly, please look at the lure below.

Many of you have seen this lure. Simple beauty, perfectly stream-lined, and at the same time representing what the minnow shape lure should be.

This is one of the best selling lure, K-TEN from the brand called Tackle House.

There is a history and philosophy behind the brand and its products. They keep making this lure shine in the competitive current fishing tackle industry.

The beginning with Twinkle

The company Tackle House was established in 1982 with the first product, Twinkle.

This Twinkle is the lure for large trout in still water, starting with 130mm, 105mm and 90mm, and it became very popular for the stream trout fishing as it added the smaller sizes under the Twinkle series. This lure was developed by the company’s founder, Mr. Eiichi Shibuki. According to the featured article in a magazine (link,) he wanted to make a minnow shaped lure that was affordable for everyone. At that time, most of the minnows were imported lures, such as Rapala’s, Redfin and Bomar Long A, and a few handmade lures. They were too expensive for a normal angler to buy. Driven by the idea to make an affordable Japanese minnow, Mr. Shibuki started his actions to make his lure.

However, he did not have any experience of making a lure. Therefore he started by studying competitors’ products. He analyzed sizes, dimensions of bodies, positions of internal weights, angle of the lips etc. Additionally, he visited one of the friend lure designers of Murase Minnow (which was a popular lure brand then.)  After all this knowledge, he considered the design of his lures to come. One of the unique features of this Twinkle minnow was to use a wood material called Jelutong wood, instead of commonly used balsa wood. It added strength to lures and larger density gave the longer casting distance. While there required some twitch of the design to keep the balsa material’s swimming actions, he could realize the good action with the new material. The targeted swimming action with his new lure was the main wobbling movement plus some degree of rolling actions. To have the rolling action let the body emit a flashing effect. It made the name of the series be “Twinkle.”

At that time, in the 1980’s, the main target of lure fishing in Japan was trout. The enthusiasts visited the mountain lakes to pursue the large trout, such as Rainbow trout, or Brown trout. To catch a big one, anglers were using the large sized minnow. It gave opportunity for many lure builders to have the minnow shaped lures. The famous Japanese brands at that time were Murase Minnow, Rivet, Wood Bait, HMKL. For your interest, Black bass fishing was getting popular from the 1970's and booming in the 1990’s in Japan. Along with it, trout fishing was also one of the major targets in Japan in the 1980’s. For the history of Japanese fishing in Japan, you can refer to this blog.

The advancement with K-TEN

It was 1987 that the world’s first weight oscillation mechanism was invented by Mr. Ninomiya, the product manager of Tackle House. It makes the big hit, boasting the additional 30% casting distance gained by the mechanism. The product was labeled as “K-TEN” which literally means K-point, originated K-point or Konstructionspunkt, the construction point in the term of ski jumping competition. 

A weight oscillation mechanism has the construction in which the internal sinker is movable within the lure, to make the weight balance changed in accordance with the posture of the lure. For example, in its swimming posture, most of the lures have the internal sinker slightly forward from the center of the flotation force in the body. This allows the minnow to be ready to dive when pulled, in conjunction with the lip, while swimming in stable actions. On the contrary, to cast further, it is better to have the internal sinker back of the lure body. It allows the lure’s tail part to be pointing to the casting direction, to stabilize the posture and minimize the air or wind resistance. The conventional fixed weight lure construction needs to compromise either way, for some degree.

The invention of the weight oscillation mechanism gave a good solution to the dilemma. 

The very first lure with this K-TEN mechanism was K-TEN Fresh Water, made of wood material. The original K-TEN lure was for trout fishing. And then taking advantage of long casting distance, in 1988, the plastic-made K-TEN Blue Ocean launched. It made history as the very first Japanese salt water speciality lure. 

As the salt water lure, it was made to last. Thicker 1.6 mm walled lure body of Blue Ocean was one of the emblems to show as a pure saltwater heavy duty lure.

Lipless minnow, K-TEN Lipless Minnow

As written above, one of the negative points in the minnow lures before the K-TEN was the casting distance. Along with the development of weight oscillation mechanisms, there were ideas to gain distance. To take away the lip is one idea. 

Pursuing this idea of erasing the lip resulted in the lipless minnow. It bore K-TEN Lipless Minnow, in 1989. 

While it was starting to imitate minnows without lip, the first shapes had something protruding near the front, to have lip-like function. But the product designer, Mr. Ninomiya wanted to have the one solid shape, without lip-like construction, in the shape as streamlined as possible. The final K-TEN Lipless minnow has a good feature of having an action with weak retrieve, while it does not have any protruding structure in the body. The unique front surface grasps the water to have slight features of minnows that allow users to use this lure in a wider depth range than the currently available lipless minnows. 

Target fish for this lipless minnow and above described Blue Ocean was seabass. As a very accessible large sized target, it has been a very good laboratory for saltwater lures in Japan. 

The designer, Mr. Ninomiya described the core of good lure action. The actions like a smooth and soft movement, like a snake, and the sliding actions tend to catch more. Even when the lure has no external force (like line’s pulling,) the shaking by itself with slight surrounding movement is very effective. Rolling action contains the move to simulate the shake of fish, without any excessive movement. When the action is too noticeable, the fish learns quickly that it is fake. If the action is too weak, then it does not appeal to the fish.  (Reference; this blog page of the designer.)

Invention of R-Unit

In 2002, they launched a product called Tuned K-TEN TKR.

What is special is that it has a special internal mechanism to reduce the strong wobbling/rolling

Intuitively, you feel it is strange. You may think that the stronger wobbling/rolling movement is the more appealing. The faster a lure is retrieved, the stronger action it has. This is what is happening on most of the conventional lures. However, the lure designer of this mechanism, Mr. Ninomiya thought it differently. When he observed the movement of the fish, the fish had much less unnecessary body movement when it swims faster. Then he started to have a mechanism to reduce the wobbling and rolling.

What he came up with is to install the parts to have a gyro effect. A piece of metal moves or swings inside of the body and it offsets the inertia made by the lure’s movement. This mechanism looks like the picture below.

The red part is made by a piece of lead. It swings with the center of the movement around a pin connected to the lure body. This was named R-unit.

With this mechanism, the lure starts to roll when you start retrieving. When it accelerates, the lure reduces or stops the rolling movement at a certain speed. 

You can view the video of Tuned K-TEN TKR in the link below.

Later on, this R-unit was turned into a much simpler, easy to manufacture structure. The updated R-unit has the construction with a metal ball and convex shaped floor. With this improved construction, the brand extends the use of it, and Tuned K-TEN TKW had two of this R-Unit. You can imagine that this TKW swims in the way you can never imagine.

Rolling Bait

Another unique lure design is a design feature named Rolling Bait, in 2001.

The total body shape is like a vibration lure (lipless crank bait,) with the additional fin profile lip on its back. This lure swims with wobbling action in the slow speed, and as it accelerates it makes rolling actions. Since it was invented, applications of this Rolling Bait feature had been extended to have 6 different types of products. 

As you read above, the designs of Tackle House lures are well considered to make actions of their intention. Rolling, wobbling, swimming angles etc. All of these are made from their philosophy to build lures from actual use. Designers observe their lures swimming, in relation to their target fish. Their challenges to make the best lures to provide the best experience for users are continuing.