I was recently invited to join the Kayak Fly podcast for an hour. We talked a fair amount about 3D Fly Reels - and a whole lot about carpin. I am and will always be a carper first and foremost!
You can listen to the podcast via the embedded player below or on Youtube:
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.
I am starting a small 3D printing service (The 3D Press) for fun and profit on a site called 3D Hubs. In order to start get going I am going to have to start small....VERY small. The site won't really send you orders until you have had some orders. Additionally I will need to learn the process.
Therefore I am going to ask for some help from friends, family and fans of Fly-Carpin. For those who are interested I will be offering a limited edition run of the following key-chain:
The first 20 people that download this file: Offer is over! https://drive.google.com/open?id=1AzBSrCyiSHBBGH57BALPr2S4YwQzNFup And order it from this site: Order a 3D Print Will get it for $1.00 plus shipping and handling (~Cost). After the first 20 it will default to the standard pricing which will be ~$15 to ~$20 dollars. Tiny low-volume low-margin widgets is not exactly the market I will be chasing you see. Some details when you order:
Don't worry about the initial price that the site quotes you - there is a step in the process where we adjust the price before you finalize the order.
Don't worry that the site cannot calculate the volume - it is not important for this transaction.
When it asks for Material please select Generic ABS.
You may have noticed that Fly-Carpin essentially died a couple of years ago - or maybe not. It is easier to notice the existence of a thing on the internet than it's absence. Either way I would like to tell you the story.
When, in 2014, I tried to make the Carp On The Fly On The SUP videos I found the process extremely frustrating. No matter how hard I tried I couldn't generate Go-Pro first person view (FPV) video that wasn't shaky to the point of vomitville and I felt like it interfered with my creativity.
While researching solutions I ran into something called a brushless gimbal. A brushless gimbal is a mechanism that uses three brushless motors to stabilize a camera. At the time they were mainly used for drones, professional videography and for hand-held Go-Pro stabilizers. I immediately decided that I would try and build one small enough and light enough that I could mount it on my head like a GoPro FPV camera.
Four months later I had a solid proof of concept micro gimbal which I code-named Cyclops 1.0. It had issues. Lots of issues. It had wires hanging everywhere. It had to be re-started ~ every 20 minutes for a dozen different reasons and would break completely every couple of days and had a dozen other issues that just added up to a total pain in the butt. When it did work, however, it worked GREAT and it could do stuff like this with almost perfect stabilization:
At the time I had dreams of taking this idea and doing something big with it, but first I wanted to make sure it was really viable. You know, make sure that I could get it working "good enough".
Well, something funny happened. Version 1.1 was worse in almost every way and Version 1.2 was a massive failure and I was still a family man with a day job, a fishing addiction and a blog and a major case of burnout. The family, the job and the fishing aren't optional, so I ended up having to take a break from project Cyclops AND Fly-Carpin.
Fly-Carpin will probably never recover, but I did eventually get back to work on project CLOPS (The name Cyclops gimbal is now taken for a Drone gimbal). Version 1.3 still had major issues, but was a modest step forward in terms of reliability and form factor.
In November 2016 (after another burn-out break) I started CLOPS 2.0 and it has been a massive success.
SPECS:
Camera: Mobius Action Cam integrated into the Gimbal
1080P 30 frames/s
760P 60 frames/s
Gimbal:
3d printed from Polycarbonate
102 Grams for the part mounted on your head/chest/wherever.
Variable mass depending on battery size for remote battery/power supply
Two modes (Sport and Cinematic)
Mounting flanges compatible with Go-Pro accesories
2S lipo batteries from the drone/rc plane industry. Battery life can range between 2 and 6 hours depending on battery size.
So, while Fly-Carpin the blog may not live on, Fly-Carpin the Youtube channel will and I guarantee you the footage will never be shaky again. Some examples of what V2.0 can do:
As the late summer nights get cooler the transition from catching to fishing is usually very abrupt in Colorado for carp on the fly. Typically during a two week time-span in September carp will nearly completely abandon the flats on most local still-waters. I call this transition "The Cliff".
The cliff usually starts with smaller ponds and lakes which tend to cool faster and within the span of a few short weeks works it's way up to the larger reservoirs. Additionally, at about the same time the carp in the Denver South Platte often go into a funky mood where they stop eating. The cliff is so abrupt and harsh that my catch rates plummet which leads to depression and anxiety. Uncool cliff. Uncool.
Based on averages over the past 6 years, I expect to catch roughly 1/3 to 1/4 of the carp in the fall as I did in the summer.
This year however, I see signs of the cliff but I am still finding some prime fishing this September. For example, I had one day recently were I caught 16 carp in about 4 hours on a small lake which is close to my highest catch rate over a 4 hour span ever. On another day I caught my first ever goldfish.
And just a week later I caught this 24lb common from my SUP which is my new personal best in Colorado.
And just a few days later the Carp Slam broke records for the most carp caught in the tournament. Even I managed to wrangle two to the net.
All in all September has been absolutely stellar and as of this afternoon continues to be so. So I ask you .... Where is the Cliff? And how hard is it going to hurt?
