RIO spends thousands of hours on the water researching, designing & refining products.
For more than 20 years, RIO has demonstrated passion, innovation and a pure love for the sport through its development of the industry's highest performance fly lines. And the great news is, we will continue to research, design and refine our products to ensure they are your preferred line of choice for years to come.
In 1990, Jim and Kitty Vincent founded RIO in the mountains of Idaho on the idea that exceptional fly fishing products should be built by anglers for anglers. More than twenty five years later, we're still in Idaho and driven by that same ethos. Most of us here are passionate fly fishing bums, wading all day in cold, clear Idaho trout streams, lighting delicate dries and heaving huge streamers - hooking, (losing), landing, turning loose fish after fish... what a grind. We won't even mention the horror of having to battle tarpon after bonefish after permit in the balmy turquoise tropics, or braving the wrath of angry chrome in BC. It's true, RIO's cast members donate literally thousands and thousands of hours on the water researching, designing and refining our products, so that when the boss or spouse pushes you out the door to go fishing - yet again - at least you'll have the pleasure of throwing the highest performance fly lines out there. And even after all these years of selfless devotion to creating the industry's most comprehensive and technically advanced fly lines (designed for just about every finned creature out there) RIO's passion remains as strong as when we first began this journey. Some might smirk and say we're just fanatics, using our selfish needs to create the most sophisticated, strenuously tested products available... but we call it pride... pride in the promise to give you the absolute, hands-down, best of fly fishing excellence on your rod.
Product development like that won't happen all by itself – that level of commitment is going to require thousands more hours on the water – but somebody's got to do it, and that somebody is RIO. No matter what line family, price level or quality RIO fly line you choose, you can fish happy in the knowledge that every single fly line is made in our Idaho Falls facility – close to the banks of our premium testing grounds, the Henry’s Fork and the South Fork of the Snake in Idaho. Fly line manufacturing is a complicated business requiring incredibly sophisticated machinery. You don’t just go out and buy a fly line making machine, so most of the parts, software and electronics are custom designed and built by the R&D team on site. There are many steps to making a premium quality fly line – too many to illustrate here, but the key steps include; drying out the core material, mixing the main coating ingredients, applying the coating to the core, curing the raw fly lines, coiling lines into individual coils, welding loops on the ends, printing of RIO's Easy ID line marking system and packaging the lines into boxes. Of course, each line undergoes numerous quality control checks throughout several stages of manufacturing, as well as intensive product testing in the lab and on the water.
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