The Indications are good...

There have been some weird and wonderful bite indicators invented and cobbled-together over the years....did you come up with anything? Tell us about it...

Late 80s, I was in Spain. I had been flooded overnight and my alarms were waterlogged. A trip into the local supermarket bought a kids battery-powered Raygun with a dozen different shooting noises. I adapted it into a bite alarm which mounted on the buzzer bar and it did surprisingly good service!

...late 80s.............could it have been the 'Ronald' Raygun?

I didn't get the name Mr Gadget by the first editor of this site for no reason Cliff.
Probably the first person in the UK to use stiff hinged armed indicators as a back up to the optonics for bream fishing or any type of fishing for that matter. Circa 1977. The carp lads were still on Monkey climbers at that point.
I had a thriving cottage industry going and sold 100s of them around the NW and midlands in the early 80s to the Specimen Hunters. Even the said Editor had quite a few pairs of me. Think I charged £5 00 a pair at the time.

They were and are that good, that I still use them on the infrequent breaming session I do these days. The principle is still the same, but I'm on about Mk 20 now and still sell a few pairs of handcrafted ones each year.

Branched out to electronic back biters mid 80s for piking (still got them and use them on the odd piking trip I do) that worked on a rotating magnet principle and registered both up and down movement of the arm. The Gardner ones didn't at that time only worked on the uplift. Even put the same system into my optonics several years before the Magnotronics came along. Still got them as well in full working order.

In collaboration with Derek Quirk (anybody remember him?) we made some optonic style buzzers as a project, 10 I seem to recall. Derek made the boxes at work on the computerised lath system (he worked as an project engineer in the car industry) and I made the electronic guts, magnetic mechanism and assembled them. Around the same time the Magnotronics hit the market. So they remained just a collaborative project idea and a relic of our ingenuity, which I still have, again in full working order.

As a result of the stiff armed indicators and the incorporation of isotopes in them, around 82ish I developed probably the first usable end of the rod isotope for river fishing. That screwed into a threaded end ring and stud upright from the end of the rod. Still have a few of them Kicking around as well, but no longer use them as better ones have since been manufactured.

As with all of the things I’ve designed down the years, I have the evolutionary drawing signed and dated as a historic record.

On frequent occasions when I fish with a mate at weekends he has become my most reliable improvised bite indicator during my inevitable, impromptu naps

I once knew an angler that used aluminium foil as an indicator, when it was windy he would hold it down with a brick didn't work to well.

I used a 5inch (or thereabouts) cylindrical tube as a butt indicator while bream fishing (boo hiss) for a while. It was an advance on the squeezy bottle top. The bore of the tube allowed the line not to touch it between first and second rings when under tension so was quite wide probably an inch or so. When casting the tube was held against the rod so as not to to interfere with the line. It worked well enough at the time (if you remembered to thread the line through it at start up). I didnt want it to fly off on the strike.

Back in the late 50's when I was a kid I used a fork or spoon leaning across my line on a tin plate and small tailored tin contraptions placed on the reel spools called 'Spool engines'; when I got a little older and started a paper round I bought and read "Confessions of a Carp Fisher" by BB which had a diagram of Richard Walkers simple bite alarm circuit in it, so I made my first bite alarm using two contacts separated by a piece of lolly stick and a rubber band wired to a battery and a small buzzer, then later I bought my first "Heron" bite alarms.

I used various bobbin indicators from corks with two map pins or a hair grip to clip onto the line to yellow washing up liquid tops and later various home made monkey climbers.

As soon as the first Optonics came out I bought a couple of them and later (when I was designing printed circuit boards for a living) I modified my Optonics to add latching circuits, telephone speakers and damp proofing (this was just before you could get this done by Delkim) and an output socket and extension box to put inside my bivvie.

Keith.

Keith M said:

Heron" bite alarms

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What a pain in the bum they could be on windy days/nights, a definite improvement on staring at other contraptions all session though.

Heron bite alarms?





Time to go mow the lawn I think mg:

The bad one said:

I didn't get the name Mr Gadget by the first editor of this site for no reason Cliff.
Probably the first person in the UK to use stiff hinged armed indicators as a back up to the optonics for bream fishing or any type of fishing for that matter.

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Bad one, Just on a historical note stiff armed indicators were widely used back in the sixties, particularly on the the fenland match scene where Bream were the target species.
Simply called butt indicators they were often preferred in very windy conditions when the swingtip was less effeciant.
They were stamped under the manufacturers surname of"le maison bois"( Walter Woodhouse) a Sheffield tackle dealer.
Tho not used in conjunction with any other backup they were the real deal and if they were made today in a slightly longer format than the 5/6 inches of the originals I reckon they would be just as good as most similar products.

The one's you allude too were also used around the country at the same time. About 6-8 in long, Terry clip at one end and a round jewellery clip at the other. And used between the reel and butt ring. Fixed permanently (kind of?) to the rod and line whilst in use. Completely useless when casting 70 yards on some windswept mere. The line wouldn’t pass through the small jewellery clip fast enough resulting in a knot up and ripping the whole lot off the rod if you didn’t get a crack off. They bore no resemblance to the ones I designed other than having a short stiff arm.

The ones I designed were hinged at the connecting joint under the opto and at the bobbin end that allows the bobbin to remain in a vertical position through out a bite. They also face the other way round to the 60s butt indicators, were/are 14-16 in long and came completely free when you struck at a fish and didn’t use a Kirby grip in the design. It used a thick nylon cord hanger, the nylon cord was actually used in the butchery trade for what’s called Middle Pullers. The nylon is very similar to strimmer nylon but slightly thicker and had to be heat treated to get the hanger set in it. Which on the strike opens out allowing the line to come free from it.

As to your point about the 60s ones being serviceable today if longer? They are and I’ve got several designs about 12-14 in long with far bigger jewellery clip type rings (designed by me) that I use for perching and cast up to 30 yards. If a further distance cast is need, it's best to unclip them as you get the 60s problems of knot ups. To some degree the extended length given by these does decrease the knotting up problem, but not eliminate it, because they are fished between the butt and second ring. Even though the Terry clip and rod fixing is reelside of the butt ring.
And here’s a tip for anyone using Terry Clips. Cycle Innertube is your best friend as you can cut thin rings from it and wrap them round the top of the Clip giving it a very secure fix to the rod. And they last many, many times longer than any elastic band could ever do.

Bad one, I fully agree on almost everything you say, tweaking things and ironing out irksome gremlins as you did was commendable.
It was just the the " history " bit and a little note of the forerunners that I thought deserved a mention.
Flight-- .

I've still got an old Fairy Liquid bottle top in my box, mended several times with superglue and a cable tie, and wouldn't be without it. It has come in handy when I've forgotten the buzzers or bobbins and once when I found some very shy Loddon chub that wanted a lot of slack line. My first bite alarm was a penny on a tin which I used in the 60s at Longfield before saving up for a pair of heron buzzers. The penny and tin was more reliable!

The Crow...........there's was nothing wrong with the Heron! Your memories of its performance on windy nights are - I believe - predicated on pre-line clip, weighted 'swinger' days. It was the lack of line-tension at fault - not the indicator head

Once fished the upper Withan for roach. Low and clear it was tricky , especially with the sun rising behind me on the east bank.
Early morning dog walkers invariably stopped to ask if the fish were biting casting a long shadow over the river bed and spooking the fish.
Problem solved by an early arrival and gently floating a big sheet of black polythene supported with polyballs front, side and back at the tail end of my float swim.
The fish holed up beneath it and with carefull positioning of a float set overdepth and held back so the bait laid underneath it was hook a duck.
One dog owner once metioned the "litter" was a discrace.

Cliff Hatton 2 said:

The Crow...........there's was nothing wrong with the Heron! Your memories of its performance on windy nights are - I believe - predicated on pre-line clip, weighted 'swinger' days. It was the lack of line-tension at fault - not the indicator head

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Yes it was before that, the heads were still ****, only sounded on a full blooded run, if you tried to adjust them to be more sensitive they would be "buzzing" all night for nothing.

If there was nothing wrong with them why did they not continue making them?

..I thought they were rather good, Crow, though the Romang head conversions did improve them. I lost my Romang 3-port, tone and volume adjustable, converted Heron sound box at a lake in Chigwell some years ago: well sick I was..........
By the way, Crow....time was we ALL used aluminium foil for indicators - very good it was too. They shone to some extent even on the darkest night and on moonlit nights they were plainly visible. A foil 'tube' rather than a fold-over could be weighted with pebbles to keep the line taut and the indicator relatively stable in low winds. They made a distinctive sound on rising or on being pulled across the ground.

Always preferred a cork with a large betalight from inside the motorway ph........... well the less said about them the better I think I see they are not used now

thecrow said:

Always preferred a cork with a large betalight from inside the motorway ph........... well the less said about them the better I think I see they are not used now

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On that note Crow I could embrace some well-known anglers who fished around the 3 Counties back then…. But I won’t! That was then, and you did what you did, because the pups don’t know they were born with what they have today, in comparison to what you had to do/make back then to get by and improve your fishing.

On the Heron note, I seem to remember the problem with the Mk 1 was the moisture getting across the contact and shorting it out. They did remedy it by putting in a Z antenna but BJ Alarms (much better) had come on the market by then and took the carp market by storm for a few years, until Optonics came along.