El Hefe 3D Printed Fly Reel

For those who may stumble upon or re-visit Fly-Carpin I would like to tell you a little bit about my latest endeavor.  

For the past 3.5 years I have been working on designing and testing a 3D printed fly reel.  Now this is Fly-Carpin and Fly-Carpin is what I do.  So when I set out to design this fly reel the one and only goal was that it would be a carp catching machine.  No toys would do.

Well - after thousands of hours design and build and test and repeat and rinse I recently launched my first model "El Hefe" at 3dflyreels.com.  As of this blog post I have sold 10 reels and shipped the first 5!  That makes me a fly fishing gear manufacturer!

This is a fully functional reel appropriate for big-game that has been carp tested and carp approved.  Between me and some carping buddies such as John Montana, Wendy Berrell and Dan Frasier we have caught well over 500 carp on various iterations of this reel and a good number (40?) of those have been over 20lbs.