Rapala countdowns7/31/2023 ![]() The industry is moving away from using lead weights due to environmental reasons, and replacing lead isn’t easy. “Finding the right material for the lure’s weights was by far the most challenging step. The lure needed to fly. But this proved technically difficult: how to ensure the lure was heavy enough without cramping up the delicate swimming action? It was paramount for the Rapala PD team that the CountDown Elite’s casting abilities were in a league of its own. However, the biggest challenge was yet to come. ![]() The colleague – and many others – gave it a try, but the CountDown Elite returned to Finland in one piece. It was handed to a burly colleague as a challenge: try and pull the bait’s diving lip off. The story has that a prototype of the lure was taken to the ICAST trade show a couple of years ago. We figured out a way to attach the diving lip to the rigid internal wire instead of the wood, giving the lure even more robust construction.” “And there’s more to the wire-through construction. But we made an additional discovery: we found a way to make the wire that runs through the lure’s body about 20-30 % stronger than before! In a lure this small, that’s a tremendous percentual difference,” Peter explains. “We started looking into ways to make the CountDown Elite as tough as possible, and the first thing was to add a through-wire. That meant ticking off two boxes: durability and castability. With this cutting-edge technology at their disposal, the PD team started thinking of ways to modernize the CountDown. Today, we can craft lures that would have been unimaginable in the 1960s. But, since the 1965 introduction of the original CountDown, hard bait technology has taken immense leaps. If you look at the CountDown Elite, you can see that the lure’s slim but prominent profile is based on the original design. We wanted to think every aspect through and through because the task wasn’t easy – the original CountDown is still catching fish all over the world! It’s a legendary lure, and the CountDown Elite wasn’t designed to replace it, but to complement it.”Īnd that’s where the team found their starting point: from the high-profile design of the original CountDown – the profile that had been fooling fish for more than half a century. “You should have seen the first prototype – it was nothing like the lure that’s now on the shelves! During the three years we spent designing the CountDown Elite, we came up with probably 20 different prototypes,” says Lure Designer Peter Mörsky, one of the designers leading the project. ![]() Working in close cooperation with Japanese experts, the PD team sent different prototypes to Japan for approval, working towards the final product step by step. Each development process is unique, and some projects can take a lot of time – and patience. With these specs to guide them, the PD team started developing CountDown Elite, the lure that would make a splash not only in Japan but also in Europe.īut it wasn’t a clear-cut case. The goal was to make a modern version of a long-trusted Rapala classic, the CountDown, and introduce it to the booming trout fishing scene in Japan. It was late 2017 when the Product Development team at Rapala started conceptualizing a new lure for the brand.
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