BARBATOS Development Secrets Vol. 1

The Birth of the BARBATOS: Breaking Down the Design Process

By: Nakanishi, ADUSTA Lure Designer

Welcome to the first installment of a multi-part series where I will take you behind the scenes of how we developed the BARBATOS. Today, let's look at how it all started.

1. It Began with the Silent Blaster’s Insane Catch Rate

Everything kicked off in June 2020 during a media shoot at Ikehara Reservoir. We were filming with legendary angler Satan Shimada as he fished the Silent Blaster. Right after landing a solid 50cm+ (20-inch+) bass, he cast to the exact same spot on his third throw and hooked a massive 66cm, 4kg+ (9.1 lbs) monster.

Editor's Note: While media trips are meticulously planned around the best weather, temperatures, and seasons, the results from this specific day were absolutely legendary. Landing a giant Rokumaru (60cm+ bass) right after a 50cm fish is unheard of.

The rain had just stopped, leaving the water muddy and stained. The combination of the Silent Blaster's blade vibration, unique sound signature, bulky profile, and lip action perfectly synchronized with Shimada’s flawless presentation and tracking line. Shimada threw that bait all day long and couldn't stop praising its fish-calling power and raw fish-catching potential.

Naturally, this sparked a conversation within ADUSTA: How can we take the core DNA of the Silent Blaster and evolve it into something completely new?

2. Up-Sizing the Beast: Balancing Water Displacement and Pulling Resistance

Our first move was simple: scale up the original Silent Blaster body configuration proportionately into a giant bait.

At the time, large-profile giant baits equipped with diving lips were practically non-existent on the market. We were stepping into uncharted territory, especially regarding pulling resistance (torque on the reel). We produced 3D-printed prototypes in three different overall body lengths (excluding the lip and tail):

• 178mm (7 inches)

• 205mm (8 inches)

• 230mm (9 inches)

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The original Silent Blaster features a thick, bulky profile that displaces a massive amount of water relative to its size. When scaling that up to a giant bait, finding the right balance between water displacement and reel torque was a massive hurdle.

By default, a giant bait displaces plenty of water. If we just kept the exact original body proportions, the pulling resistance would be brutally heavy. When we rigged up the first 3D-printed prototypes and tested them, our fears were confirmed—the strain on the arms was intense. Knowing this would be a grind, I headed out to meet Shimada for on-the-water field testing to get his expert feedback.

Through rigorous field tests and meetings, our main directives became crystal clear: How do we reduce pulling resistance? and Can this bait handle a high-speed burn?

(Watch the early development footage here: https://youtu.be/gDc5oyfqBO0)

To strike the perfect balance between a size that anglers can throw all day without fatigue and a profile big enough to draw fish from deep water, we settled on an optimized length of 195mm (7.6 inches). With the dimensions locked in, Shimada raised another critical question: Does a giant bait of this size actually need the loud internal rattle system of the original Silent Blaster?

3. Dialing in the Sound Signature

The original Silent Blaster uses a loud internal rattle chamber packed into a 140mm body, creating a highly aggressive, high-appeal presentation.

However, when you scale up to a giant bait profile, that same internal rattle can easily become overkill. We realized that the heavy joint-knocking sound (the natural impact sound of the body segments hitting each other) provided more than enough acoustic attraction. Ultimately, we decided to eliminate the internal rattle altogether to keep the presentation natural yet commanding.

4. Overcoming the High-Speed Pulling Strain

The ultimate goal was to fully optimize this bait for Shimada's signature giant bait style: the ultra-high-speed retrieve, while maintaining an irresistible swimming action.

With a standard 10cm (4-inch) lure, reel resistance is negligible. But with a giant bait, that resistance multiplies exponentially, putting massive strain on the angler's arms and wrists. On top of that, the depth requirement was highly specific: it needed to run shallow. The bait could not dive too deep or stay completely on top during a high-speed burn.

We started with a classic wake-bait style lip, similar to the Silent Blaster. To get a hard-thumping swimming action, we couldn't make the lip too small, yet making it too large would make the bait unformidable to retrieve.

We went through over 20 different variations, tweaking the lip size, line eye placement, and entry angles. Along the way, we accidentally created some incredible accidental variations—some were perfect for a standard steady retrieve, others were lethal at a dead-slow crawl—but they didn't fit our core high-speed concept.

5. Balancing Action, Depth, and the Tail-Blade Experiment

After endless trial and error, we finally nailed the swimming action, but the diving depth was still off. Shimada’s feedback was firm: "It’s diving too deep. I want a bait that runs in the visual strike zone—where I can see the fish chasing it down."

As a designer, once you find a lip configuration that achieves a perfectly balanced swimming action, you don't want to mess with it. So, we had to figure out: How do we decrease the diving depth without changing the lip?

We shifted our focus away from the lip and looked for external solutions. I started thinking about legendary lures, specifically the classic Heddon Hellbender—a historic crankbait famous for its snag-resistance. That lure featured a tiny metal blade attached to the tail. While Heddon likely used it for tracking stability, I wondered if we could apply that concept to our advantage.

The BARBATOS is designed for a blistering-fast retrieve. By adding a larger blade to the tail, we could create upward hydrodynamic lift. This lift would counteract the diving force of the lip, keeping the bait pinned in the upper water column while maintaining high-speed stability.

By fine-tuning the blade size, we finally hit our target depth and high-speed stability. We sent Shimada out to put this tail-blade prototype to work during a shoot for Fishing Vision (a major Japanese fishing network).

(See the tail-blade prototype catch a giant Rokumaru on TV here: https://youtu.be/blf7yqJz7o8)

Over the next three months, across two separate TV shoots and extensive re-filming, Shimada relentlessly pounded the water with the BARBATOS, sending back constant field reports.

However, as Shimada went toe-to-toe with giant bass in real-world conditions, a new issue emerged. The tail-blade configuration created so much lift that it turned the bait into a pure topwater lure. He needed it to run just a fraction deeper under the surface.

Chasing an angler's perfection means embracing endless trial and error. It’s the most exciting part of design, but also the most grueling. We decided to completely wipe the slate clean, reset the lip and tail configurations, and restart with unconventional angles we hadn't dared try before.

https://youtu.be/blf7yqJz7o8

6. The Breakthrough: The Shallow-Range, High-Speed SF Lip

Initially, we stuck to conventional lure design logic, altering the size and placement of traditional lip shapes. But we reached a point where we realized that to deliver what Shimada needed, we had to throw out the rulebook.

Lure action and pulling resistance are dictated by a delicate matrix: buoyancy, weight distribution, diving angle, body geometry, lip shape, lip angle, and line eye placement. For the BARBATOS, we needed to find the golden ratio between a massive body and a radically new lip design.

Our breakthrough came when we did the exact opposite of standard design: we angled the lip backward, slightly tilted toward the tail. This drastically reduced pulling resistance. To ensure the bait didn't lose its swimming action, we widened the lip profile and incorporated a distinct L-shaped lip face to catch subtle water currents. This allowed the giant jointed bait to produce a sharp, tight, minnow-like swimming action.

We built four variations of this new lip design with slight angular differences and headed out to Hitokura Dam for a decisive field test with Shimada.

From first light, we repeatedly swapped between the four lip designs. We managed to narrow the selection down to two final candidates. The physics were incredibly tight: if we reduced the pulling resistance too much, the action became sluggish and dead. If we angled it to thump harder, the cranking resistance became too exhausting. We were operating on a razor's edge.

After multiple on-site modifications right there on the water, we finally perfected the balance. The result is the official production model lip: The SF Lip.

We rushed back, printed the finalized 3D prototypes, and handed them over to Shimada. It didn't take long for him to prove it worked.

In true "Satan" Shimada fashion, he utilized the superb weedless and snagless properties of the new SF Lip to burn the bait directly under heavy floating debris and mats. The bass gave us an immediate, explosive stamp of approval. The BARBATOS was finally complete.