H2O Magazine spring 2020

Bengt Engelbrekt had his first fishing experience thanks to an English gentleman that showed him how to cast a dry fly in 1961 in Norway. In 1975 he started to make bamboo fly rods with a milling machine.

But it was in 1977 that he built his first trout reel and in 1988/90 the two first salmon reels.

His company was officially born in 1990 under the name : Engelbrekt Reels and Rods Company.

The first reel that Bengt made in the seventies had the following specs. Take a WF4F and 80 meter backing, small in diameter 2 1/2 ”and wide and have the look of a classic American fly reel, but with a modern feature to be able to brake on the spool edge. He built this reel for himself but his fishing friends liked it so much that he decided to make a series of 13 reels of the same size.

This reel was named TR4 Autograph ,2 3/8” in diameter. The Autograph fly reel consists of 6 sizes from TR1 3” to TR6 2”. The brake is a simple click type but with a bigger gear wheel to have a smoother brake.

Reels are made of high strength aluminium bar, stainless steel, phosphor bronze and titan are also used, handles are made of ivory from the woolly mammoth at least 20000 years old, two silver plaques that are hand engraved, one with the customer‘s name and one with his Autograph.

At the end of the eighties, several people thought he would produce a salmon reel, so he considered which salmon reels made the most impression on fishermen. Hardy Perfect was one and Edward vom Hofe‘s different models the others.

In the early nineties he made two prototypes, SA1 3 " and SA5/0 4 1/8", the smallest and the largest of his six sizes in the Autograph series. Then his buddies tested the smallest reel around the world Kola Peninsula in Russia, Norway, Iceland, USA, Canada and of course Sweden.

From the comments about those fishing trips he