The Lead Shed

Lead Range

With the recession firmly taking hold across the country and affecting everything that we purchase - in and out of angling - saving a few quid when buying items of tackle is firmly at the front of a lot of anglers' minds at the moment.

The Lead Shed are a small family run up and coming business supplying leads to anglers direct at superb value for money. When Aaron Rout, the owner of Lead Shed, sent us down some of the leads that the company make and supply, we were amazed at the quality of the leads for the price. All of the leads (other than the back leads) sell for 60p each, which is less than half the price of the average lead in the shops!

The Lead Shed coat all of their leads, and at time of writing they have 5 coatings available - Weed Green, Chod, Gravel and the "Naturals" "Mucky" & "Leafy".

The first three coatings are smooth which protects the lead itself from any damage from dropping on hard gravel or flint, but also camouflages the lead slightly over various substrates. The "Naturals" coatings are as the name suggests, natural, the camouflage effect is much more apparent. The "Naturals" consists of "Mucky" and "Leafy". The "Mucky" coating is a slightly rough sandy type coating that really does camouflage the lead over dark substrates such as leaf litter aka chod and silt. The "Leafy" coating is a much rougher type of coating, that is actually dried out leaf's, which you cannot get more natural than that when fishing under trees or bushes. The "Leafy" coating does absorb liquids to some extent which does cause the colur to darken to the colour of fresh leaf drop that may have sunk to the bottom.

The swivel leads all use a solid loop to which a size 8 large eye swivel is fitted. The large eye and wire diameter used allows the leads to be able to come off of lead safety clips with little problems. The Inline leads in the range have a two part insert system; the first part is a soft rubber compound that allows the swivel to be pulled into it snugly to create a bolt effect, but if the lead gets snagged will release to allow a drop off if line breakage occurs, the second part is a hard stiff plastic that will take a tail rubber perfectly to neaten up the lead arrangement and reduce the chance of tangles.

The Lead Shed produce a large array of leads in different types and sizes and the 2010 product list is as below;

Final Thoughts

After looking at the range from The Lead Shed, we can visualise how these leads will fit into our own angling. Each of the leads has been well produced with virtually no imperfections in them at all. The smooth coated leads are up to the task with ease that they have been designed to do and the "Naturals" will definately be used on clear waters where the fish have seen everything.

We are not saying that you should buy these leads over any others, as every angler has their own preferences, but on waters where you need to lose the lead on the take due to weed or bars, then you are not going to begrudge losing one of these leads at the cost of them. Even if you don't lose leads often, there is no harm in having a pouch of spares in the car just in case you do run out of leads, which is a double bubble bonus. Obviously because of the sheer weight of leads, postage is not going to be cheap, but the more you order, the cheaper the postage becomes and the individual unit price is still cheaper than most.

At the quality and price that these leads are, you cannot fault them, and we can see a lot of anglers putting a lot of these in their lead collection over the coming seasons. I know that I will be!!!