By Jonathan LePera
Special to BassFan


(Editor's note: BassFan will suspend publication of First Cast stories during the holidays as it does each year, although important breaking news will still be reported. The staff wishes everyone a joyous and safe holiday. We'll resume feature publication on Tuesday, Jan. 3.)

Crafting the top-selling crankbait in the industry did not happen by chance, by surprise, or even by accident. And it certainly didn’t happen overnight.

When Strike King introduced the KVD 1.5 square-bill in late 2010 it was only after devoting several years – three to be exact – to discussion and debate, planning, testing and eventual perfection.

The 1.5 was the brainchild of Phil Marks, Strike King’s noted lure designer, along with seven-time Bassmaster Angler of the Year Kevin VanDam, the lynchpin of Strike King’s pro staff whose friendship with Marks now spans three decades.

Their dogged collaboration on the 1.5 and VanDam’s consistent tournament success with it resulted in the diminutive crankbait becoming one of the top-selling baits the industry has seen. While Bass Pro Shops and Tackle Warehouse declined to divulge sales figures for the 1.5 for this story, Marks indicated Strike King has sold more than 10 million of them.

What follows is the story behind how the KVD 1.5 came to be and why it’s one of the most popular baits among anglers in the United States.

Where It All Began

Marks graduated from Texas A&M with an engineering degree in December 1990 and probably would have chased his aspirations of being a pro bass angler had John Barns not hired him in the fall of 1991 to be a sales rep for Bliss Murski Sales. The rep group worked with numerous sporting goods and hunting and fishing companies, including Strike King, which at the time was still owned by Charles Spence.

In 1995, Spence sold Strike King to Ray Murski and Barns took over as president of Strike King the following year. It’d be another 15 years before the 1.5 showed up on shelf pegs across the country.

Marks seemed destined for a career in the fishing industry. He grew up on Lake Conroe and his adolescence coincided with Rick Clunn’s dominance of the Bassmaster circuit. Clunn, who was Marks’ childhood idol, also lived on Conroe and Marks became enamored with how Clunn went about his business.

“Especially when he won the Classic in ’76 and ’77, I mean that guy walked on water,” Marks said. “That was way before Kevin VanDam.”

Marks would pick Clunn’s brain about hard baits. He’d ask about what made certain ones unique and how he used them to trigger bass to bite.

“Even today, Rick has got so much locked away in his brain, it’s crazy,” Marks said. “From speed and retrieves, he did a lot of things differently than most guys did way back then. He kind of started me on how I fish.”

It’s been Marks’ experience that both Clunn and VanDam seem to favor the same qualities in hard baits.

Well before his involvement with Strike King and his namesake square-bill, VanDam used a Cotton Cordell Big O to fill the void.

“I was a big proponent, early in my career, of wooden square-bills,” VanDam recalled. “The fascination for me was that no two were the same. If you got a really special one, they’d have a unique action because they weren’t really balanced and the bait would not run in a straight line.”

VanDam recalled the early square-bills had a “good wiggle to them, but they really didn’t do much when they deflected off cover.”

Not only was finding a good one a needle-in-a-haystack proposition, many lacked the side-to-side hunting action that’s now a hallmark of square-bills.

Dream Team

Marks was never a slouch of an angler. He’s won just about every major bass tournament in Texas and has banked more than $1 million with a rod and reel in hand.

VanDam’s success is well known and the common ground between the two extends beyond the water. They both have a burning desire to win and that bleeds over to their quest to design the best baits that produce the best results.

“Kevin and I are very good friends and we have been for the past 20 years,” Marks said. “We talk often about what’s going on in U.S. and Japanese markets. That’s the deal with Kevin – he bridges the gap between obviously being the best tournament angler ever, but the business side of it, too. He gets it. He understands the limitations.“

Marks credits VanDam’s understanding of the design process for trimming down the time required to get a bait ready for production.

“He’s made me better at what I do,” Marks added. “I’d like to think we get the baits right so he can catch more fish.”

VanDam says his synergy with Marks has been a big part of his success over the years.

“His engineering background and understanding how water and air flow around objects and how they can affect movement, made it easy,” VanDam said.



FLW
Photo: FLW

Aside from heading up Strike King's lure design program, Phil Marks is also an accomplished angler with more than $1 million in tournament earnings, including an FLW Tour Open win at Sam Rayburn Reservoir is 2012.

Marks attributes Strike King’s long list of successful hard baits to their design process and VanDam’s work ethic. He readily admitted that VanDam is not one to settle. If it isn’t perfect, they’ll both work together until it is. Marks knows that VanDam wants to build baits that not only produce for him, but for his fellow competitors and anglers.

“If he is going to endorse and design a product, he wants it to be as good as it can be,” Marks said. “Having the whole upper echelon watching what he does makes him do a better job and puts 110 percent into it.”

Wood vs. Plastic

When he was younger, Marks was intrigued why all wooden square-bills didn’t consistently act the same. Anglers would have to sift through loads of baits they’d bought in the hopes of finding one that had the “magic.” Even then, anglers would only use them in tournament situations or in areas where they didn’t fear losing it.

Even before his college days, Marks tried to figure out why one bait was better than another.

“In wood, you get density differences and different centers of gravity on every bait so you have a little different action with every bait,” he said.

The “magic” element shines through in baits that are more erratic than the others and that don’t just swim in a straight line. Instead, they’ll kick to the left then to the right, but not consistently.

VanDam says the biggest drawback of wooden baits was (and still is) durability.

“Barely, you could get a handful of days fishing out it,” he said. “The paint would chip or break and it would soak water and you would lose that action.”

With all the modern technology available, BassFans might assume the design process behind the 1.5 was a piece of cake. To the contrary, it tested Marks’ mettle as he sought a happy medium.

“It was hard – really difficult,” he said.

In order to give the bait its hunting action, it needed to be unstable.

“In making a bait unstable, you can cross over the threshold to making it too unstable that it isn’t a very good bait,” he added. “You push that envelope to wherever that center of gravity is positioned in relationship to the line tie. The bill is the stabilizing factor in a bait. Equally important is the bill angle as is the relationship between the center of gravity, which is so key as is the pull point and where the hooks are located.”

By the mid-2000s, VanDam had about hit his breaking point as he yearned for a bait that exhibited a specific action on a consistent basis. He was dissatisfied with other options on the market.

Despite companies trying to produce them from plastic, there was nothing unique about their action. Basically, he wanted a plastic bait with the qualities of a wooden one.

“I went to Strike King wanting to actually build a bait that had balance issues, that wasn’t perfect, that had a good wiggle to it, that was uniquely erratic in its action that you could duplicate time and again,” VanDam said.

From there, VanDam’s extensive knowledge of bass fishing, hard baits, and the triggering qualities that a bait needed was paired with Marks’ astute engineering sense, design eye and his own fishing logic.

VanDam was very much a student of the sport at the time, but also a quick learner with a sharp mind and an unbending expectation that the baits he endorsed be perfect when they rolled out of the production facility. If every single bait did not perform the same, then it was back to the drawing board.

After several years of discussion and development, Marks began the process of building the first prototypes. Both agreed the pivotal element of the bait needed to be its hunting action as that would trigger a bass’ instinct to eat.

The Perfect Recipe

Marks shared his knowledge of bait design with VanDam and the two set out to build that “magic” bait. They played around with wall thickness and weighting, placement of hook hangers and hook sizes.

“Even adding a coat of paint changes the weight and balance of crankbaits,” VanDam said.

Taking into account what VanDam wanted from the 1.5, Marks got to work.

“The wilder you make the bait act, you’re going to give something else up – depth,” Marks said.

On a square-bill, you are giving up inches, not feet. Both VanDam and Marks attested to hitting bottom in 7-feet of water with the 1.5 on 10-pound fluorocarbon. If the action was subtler, it would dive another foot deeper.

“You could get the square-bill to dive deeper if you lowered the center of gravity,” Marks said.

Once the design was complete, Marks turned his attention toward achieving the optimal hunting action and depth. It was a trial-and-error process that involved moving internal components a micron (one-millionth of a meter) this way or a micron that way.

Strike King
Photo: Strike King

The KVD 1.5 square-bill is available in 31 different colors now, including Delta craw.

It was a tedious process, but through the use of modern technology the prototyping process is as easy as a mouse click. Once a basic concept is established, Marks develops a CAD file before converting to a stereolithography (SLA) file. The SLA file is the kingmaker as it is responsible for the physical reproduction of the prototype process.

“That file drives a program that creates an exact prototype out of a liquid epoxy bath by curing with a laser beam,” Marks said. “Pretty cool stuff.”

The immediate benefit is that the dimensions are exact and numerous revisions can be made to the bait, but it does lengthen the prototype process. It takes two weeks to develop each bait during this phase.

Once VanDam got his hands on a prototype, he’d head to his pool and toss the bait around. VanDam’s contributions become integral in the latter part of the prototype process when Marks felt he was close to a finished product.

“When Phil gets one that is close, he’ll send it to me, but he doesn’t tell me what he thinks,” VanDam said. “He has his own opinions of them. He’ll send them to me and I’ll look at it. We’ve done it with all of our crankbaits.”

At $800 a shot, a near replica can be produced, albeit the epoxy does have a different weight than the plastic that is used in the final product. Interestingly, this is the same technology that doctors have been using for human skulls and dentists use to find cavities in teeth because of its precision.

Even once a bait goes into production, Marks’ work far from over. From time to time, he will order a case of lures off the production line and pool-test them to do his own quality control. If he finds something he doesn’t like, those baits will get culled out.

Home Run Hitter

VanDam had no idea the 1.5 was going to erupt into the sales phenomenon that it has become. It probably helped that he won the 2011 Bassmaster Classic with it shortly after its release. For the next year, production struggled to meet the growing demand for the 1.5.

“To say for sure that I knew what we were going to end up with while we were working on it, I’d be lying,” he said. “But we hit on the right combination and we’ve got a really uniquely special bait that has a lot of great attributes for fishing. Whether it’s grass or wood or rock, it has great deflection triggering qualities. It has that erratic action on the straight swim, it runs deep, and the faster you reel it the more it jumps around. Even at slow speeds it doesn’t just swim in a straight line.”

Both Marks and VanDam credited the success of not only the KVD 1.5, but all of the Strike King line to owner Barns. Marks calls it “a blessing” to work for Barns, who preaches to never settle.

“Fortunately, we have an owner who allows us the budget to build the prototypes and not just get a good bait,” VanDam said, “but to spend the extra money to keep trying to where we can get it so it’s really good.”