What is your background?
I have been involved in some sort of mechanical engineering, manufacturing and machining my entire adult life. I worked mostly in the aircraft and biomedical industries for several years. I started my own company; Cartesian Research, Inc. where I developed procedures and scientific instruments used in neurological research for which I have a couple of large patents. I sold that intellectual property about 12 years ago and semi-retired.
However I have been working with fly reels as a hobby since I was about 22 or 23 years old. I had a lathe and milling machine in my garage and puttered around at night and on weekends making reels. My first reels where patterned after Seamaster's. I junked most of them as I hated my own work, and then gave some away to friends as my work got a little better.
The Seamaster influence came from experience; you see I fished out of Ned Gray's Sierra Tackle a fly shop in Montrose California from my late teens until we moved to Oregon. Ned sold and swore by Seamaster reels as his main saltwater reel in his store. So he influenced my taste in reels also. He taught me how to cast a fly rod, I learned to tie flies in his shop from Steve Fernandez one of the best tiers in the world. And I traveled with Sierra Tackle on several trips that they hosted to Mexico and Christmas Island in the late 1970's.
The simplicity of the Seamaster reels and the heavy solid construction was the state of the art back then for a tough saltwater reel. I fell right into the idea behind the designs and started designing and making prototype reels- based around Captain Macs Seamaster's and Gar Woods Fin-nor designs.
I tried to improve on these designs, weather I was successful at that or not is someone else's decision- not my own. I just did the best I could. These reels later became my first production reel the Monarch. I started selling them through Ned's shop in the early 1980's.