30 Ubi Road 4 Singapore 408615 Tel + 65 6743 3628 Fax + 65 6745 9428
2666 South Grand Avenue Santa Ana, CA 92705, USA Tel +1 714 546 7553 Fax +1 714 546 7589
www.tiburonengineering.com
Tiburon Engineering was originally established by me in 1989. For several years prior to that time, the big sport fishing fleet in San Diego, California, had been building bigger and bigger boats that had the capability of travelling long distances and staying on the water for one to two weeks at a time with 20 paying customers aboard. These boats were able to find the big yellowfin tuna that did not venture into California waters and it introduced Southern California sport fishermen to a totally new dimension of saltwater big game fishing. In those days in Southern California the mid size overhead reels were very popular with local fishermen as there was no need for reels larger than this when fishing local waters. However, the locals soon found out that these mid size reels with their cage-type frames would not stand up to big 100-lb class tuna that they were encountering on the long range trips out of San Diego. When hooked to a 150 to 180-lb tuna, the multiple crossbar frames of these reels would flex, causing misalignment between the side plates, resulting in the spool binding up and a lost fish. This is what inspired me to develop the one-piece aluminum frame for such reels. It was an idea that caught on almost instantly and was the inspiration for establishing Tiburon Engineering. Rich Duncan joined the company in about 1993 as production manager. Rich’s knowledge and skills as a production engineer brought the ability to expand the company into a commercial job shop and prototype service center. Within a very short time, Rich became operations manager as well as my partner and co-owner of Tiburon. Together we conspired to design and develop new products for a variety of customers and markets, but our great desire was to design our own fishing reel. We were always capable of designing reels, but we wanted to design something different, something that nobody had ever designed before and something that was truly useful and not just flashy or trendy. At the beginning of 2001, we began working on designing a true automatic 2-speed lever drag reel. As far as we knew, nobody had ever done this before. By the end of the year in 2001, the result of our labor was the Tiburon Smart Shift Reel, a patented design of the world’s only fully automatic 2-speed lever drag reel, which today is available in 11 different models and is being fished in every major sport fishery in the world. Brooks Morris is the founder of Area Rule Engineering and the inventor of two of the most successful fishing tackle innovations in the history of the sport - the Dornob Lure and the T-Bar Reel Handle. Both of these inventions are patented designs and totally the brain-children of Brooks. Brooks invented the T-Bar fishing reel handle in 1993. Brooks, Rich and I had been friends for years prior to this time, and Rich and I contributed to some of the design and manufacturing methods of the early handles, but Brooks’ original design of the 18° offset to match the average angle of the human wrist was all his own doing and foresight. For many years, Tiburon Engineering made parts for the T-Bar for Area Rule Engineering. When Rich and I finished the first prototype of the Smart Shift Reel, we showed it to Brooks who immediately saw the value in the uniqueness of the invention and offered to help launch the product. Brooks became an investor and eventually a partner of Tiburon Engineering in 2002. He not only brought his creativeness to the party, but he brought the T-Bar as well.