Tony Gunderson The Lure Of A Perfect Tantrum Keeps Ex-Plumber Casting For Success

Next time you throw a tantrum, Tony Gunderson recommends the chartreuse and red.

Unless, of course, it’s after dark. That’s when dark green or black might be more effective.

No, Gunderson is not encouraging color-coded misbehavior. The Ponderay, Idaho, resident is selling a fishing lure - the Tantrum - and he just lured a $25,000 loan from the U.S. Small Business Administration.

Gunderson said he will use the government-backed loan to produce an initial run of 10,000 Tantrums by the year end. He’s looking for a space where he can shift assembly from his garage, where the Tantrum was born in early 1996.

An unlikely combination of incision and inspiration spawned the gaudy spinner-bait.

Gunderson was a plumber when herniated discs forced him to undergo two operations on his spine. Temporarily incapacitated, he started assembling lures from components purchased with a mail-order Christmas gift certificate from his wife, Edith.

He noticed wires used to make spinner baits had a bend that matched the outline of a favorite bass food, the bluegill.

His imagination took off like a lunker on light tackle.

“I couldn’t sleep for three days,” Gunderson said.

He clamped sheet metal over the wires to fill in the profile, and took the first crude lure down to Sandpoint City Beach. Casting between ice floes, Gunderson would watch the lure’s action to determine what modifications were needed.

Repeated trips to the beach - monitored by puzzled onlookers - finally yielded an acceptable design.

“It’s all correcting your mistakes,” Gunderson said.

The shape, for example, not only fends off weeds, an eye-emblazoned blade causes the lure to throb like a swimming fish.

And the lure’s body is cast from zinc, which imparts a bass-attracting ping when it hits a rock, unlike the thud produced by lead. The lighter zinc also keeps the Tantrum from sinking too rapidly through the fish “strike zone,” Gunderson said.

But zinc has its drawbacks.

Too hard to trim with shears once it comes out of the mold, zinc must be sawed and filed into the final shape, a process Gunderson said is more time-consuming than working with lead.

Even though the rest of the Tantrum is off-the-shelf components, it was taking him 15 minutes to make a single lure.

And the quality was inconsistent. Gunderson was learning the how-tos of powder-coating the hard way, using an electric fry pan and paint-stripping heat gun to warm the metal for applying the powder, and a toaster oven to bake on the finished coating.

Sometimes, he said, the result was a lure with mismatched colors on each side.

Storeowners who agreed to carry the Tantrum were picking through his samples and taking only the best. Customers were doing the same.

While Gunderson worked out his production problems, the Tantrum was proving itself in the water. Local fisherman reported solid results, and Gunderson handed out samples at bass tournaments to create further interest.

His moldmaker advised Gunderson to get his creation patented. The filings are pending, he said, with the hope a broad patent covering the shape, material, and even the sound of the Tantrum will be issued.

Gunderson said the potential market is huge.

The average subscriber to Bass Master magazine buys 43 lures a year, he said. Tournament fisherman add 61 spinner baits alone.

He said Bass Master officials cautioned against running an ad unless he could handle orders for 10,000 lures per week.

The business plan for Tantrum Lures - the company - calls for the sale of one million per year, at a retail cost of $5 to $6 each.

Gunderson said the company will have about 20 employees if sales reach that level.

One sure sign of interest: An area lure collector has already dropped by to pick up one of Gunderson’s rejects. He returned with the reject and one sample of each Tantrum color mounted on a plaque, which he had Gunderson sign.

The attention, and business demands, are starting to distract the self-described bass fanatic.

“Now when I go fishing, I start thinking about the business end of it,” he said.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo