Mantaind.com
Title
Manta Industries
Description
The need for a better reel became evident one summer weekend on one of New Jersey’s lobster wrecks, the Stolt Dagali, a tanker that sank after a collision in 1964 with the Israeli liner Shalom, which limped to port with her passengers. One diver dropped a typical reel, which free-spooled to the bottom at 130 feet/40 meters. In retrieving the line, the divers became snarled in a bird’s nest of line and kicked up enough silt to reduce the viz to zero. After freeing themselves and returning to the boat, they agreed that there had to be a better way to make a reel.
Since their inception, reels have been simple in design. A frame with a tensioning screw is mounted around a spool of line. Although simple, traditional reels can take years of diving to master to avoid the design’s inherent problems with free-spooling, free-falling, back lashing or bird nesting. Learning proper use is worse than just frustrating; it can be deadly. Manta Industries was formed soon after the Stolt Degali incident with a goal of developing a design that would change the way the diving world thinks of reels.
Features not previously incorporated would have to be build into this new reel, starting with a braking system to prevent free-falling or free-spooling. A machine shop was chosen to develop prototypes and its owner, Bob Stollen, turned out to be an active diver. Through his interest and contributions he soon became a partner and vice president of Manta Industries. Several prototypes led to the development of the Anti-Free Spool (AFS) braking system. It consists of a spring-loaded “trigger bar” held in position with custom-designed shoulder bolts to form a squeezable handle between the frame and the rotating spool. The springs are precisely tensioned to allow the spool to feed out line with a minimal amount of squeezing force, but provide enough pressure to prevent the reel from free-falling when dropped. The typical reel’s tensioning screw is replaced with a stainless steel wave washer that exerts a constant drag without the need to make continual adjustments, reducing task loading. This simple mechanism has no small and intricate parts to malfunction with use.
Languages
English
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