Arkansas Sportsman

Reeled in again while 'fixing' old fishing gear

Grimy hulks of dead spinning reels litter my workbench and toolbox.

No telling what some of these relics would be worth if they were pristine. I would settle for merely functional. I've carried them all over the country under the misguided notion that I might someday restore them to usefulness. Fat chance. These things have been out of production for so long that parts probably aren't available, and besides, my attempts to repair them are what got them in this shape.

In a former life I was a mechanic at a little joint in Waynesboro, Va., called European Auto Sport. We worked mostly on high-dollar, high-performance stuff like Porsche, SAAB, Mercedes-Benz and Audi. We built street racers similar to the cars in the Fast and Furious films. I performed some complicated operations on $100,000 sports cars, but put a spinning reel and a jeweler's toolkit in my hands and you'll have a mass of parts that will never find their way back together again.

At least, that's how it used to be. I think I'm over it now.

On Memorial Day, I salvaged some rods and reels from the Caddo River that I lost in a canoe mishap the previous Saturday. One was a Shakespeare Catera spinning reel and a Falcon Lowrider rod. That was a smooth little reel, but amazingly, two days submerged in the river locked it up tight. It's old and inexpensive, so I wouldn't be despondent if a repair job went sour.

In all of my previous attempts, I plunged in without taking note of the layout and the manner in which everything goes together It's only a few screws and springs. How hard can it be?

It's not hard until you factor in various distractions that interrupt the job, sometimes for days. Things get moved, and parts get lost. Or, they might get mixed with parts from another project.

Nevertheless, a spinning reel isn't an overly complicated machine. The Catera 6630R has a rear-operated drag adjustment, which is simpler and contains fewer parts than a front-drag model. Push the button and remove the spool. Remove the screw that secures the brass nut on the rotor, which holds the rotor to the spindle. Remove the roll pin from the spindle and remove the rotor.

This exposes the clutch and drag system. The drag is a small disc that fits inside a bushing. The disc contains six recesses that hold tiny metal cylinders. You can lose these very easily. Don't.

Next, the drag knob and trim comes off by removing two screws. The side plate comes off by removing four more screws, and an internal plate comes out by removing two more screws. This exposes the guts of the reel, a system of gears and worm drives of aluminum and brass, and stainless steel bearings.

What a mess it was in there, a slurry of degraded machine oil, caked grease and ultra-fine river grit. I removed all these parts and cleaned them one by one with an old toothbrush and paper towels. Working the bearings with my fingers, I felt grit grinding. I worked it all out with the toothbrush and a bath of machine oil until they rolled smoothly.

Then, I gave all of the gears a light coating of Hoppes Gun Grease, a light lubricant that is suitable for fishing tackle.

Putting it all back together was easy, but keeping all those little cylinders in the drag was tricky. Of course, something had to go wrong. This time it was the anti-reverse clutch. I never could get it to work again despite taking it apart and putting it back together four times. The reel works, but not as new.

It seems tainted to me. Corrupted. I don't like it anymore.

I handled a couple of Quantum Smoke spinning reels the other day. Very nice. Very smooth. And the new Mitchell 300. Field and Stream named the latter its Editor's Pick and Great Buy. It's a buyer's market for a lot of great new stuff right now.

You can see where this is leading.

Sports on 06/08/2014

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