Delkim

The company Delkim was originally formed back in the late 1970's by Del Romang and Kim Donaldson, hence the name DELKIM. the company was originally formed so the Del and Kim could purchase products for their own bait making, back in those days you couldn't just walk into tackle shop and buy every flavour and ingredient you need to make boilies. In their early days they discovered some of the most successful bait flavouring available today, such as Scopex and Strawberry.

At these times bite alarms were in there early days and everybody was using Heron Bite alarms, but they had many short comings. The late Dick Walker invented the Heron bite alarm back in 1950 and it became the cult alarm at the time. Del was not happy with his Heron's so he set about trying to improve them and it wasn't long before anglers who were fishing around Kent started to notice these conversions. Del's early conversions included LEDs, GPO speakers and electronic circuitry, and so was born the first Delkim 'Heron Conversion'. This established Delkim in the bite alarm business.

In 1976 Del made the first true Delkim bite alarm, he made four sets that he gave to Kim and some close friends.These were self contained antennae alarms and del and his mates used them for many years. These alarms were the first true Delkims and Del still has his set to this day although they never get used.

Around the time that Del was producing his early Delkims other items of carp fishing tackle were very hard to get hold of and a lot of it had to be made by hand. Del also produced the first commercially available carp weighing sling and carp retaining sack, these were made by Del's late wife Bev who used to knock them up on their kitchen table using their domestic sewing machine while still looking after their kids.

In the early 1980's the first revolutionary 'Optonic' bite alarm arrived on the market, they were a huge improvement on the Heron but it wasn't long before Del started receiving requests from anglers to modify them as they still had many areas where things could be improved. The results of his efforts resulted in the first Delkim Optonic Conversion being brought to the market and these conversions featured many ground breaking features, such as magnetic rotating sensing, low current drain and a lot more reliability. In 1986 these conversions led to legal problems with manufacturers of Optonic and these conversions stopped being made , there are still lots of them about to this day and they are still working fine. It was then that Kim Donaldson left the company in a very amicable agreement and they are still the best of friends to this day.

It was in 1983 that Del had one of those 'Urika' moments when he decided to run a piece of fishing line across the stylus of his record deck, this resulted in a patent application for the Delkim Vibration System, he then took nine years of his life to intensively develop his first Alarm which he is very proud of.