Those that have followed my reel-building & repair machinations over the years will know that I'm partial to Abu round baitcasters. They were the first "real" reels that I used, and for the past 50+ years I've been collecting them and their parts to upgrade, modify, and in some case completely wreck some perfectly fine examples. I guess I have at least 5 shoe boxes full of disassembled components, in addition to maybe 20 assembled examples, most of a very custom construct. This not to brag, rather to demonstrate my level of complete insanity on the subject. It's a sickness - of sorts anyway.
Over those 50+ years, and particularly over the past 25 or so seasons of using the Interwebs, I've found many, many vendors of factory, one-off and completely custom Abu round reel parts. I have to believe that there is no other reel family that has more of a custom component "cottage" industry than Abu round reels. It's just not possible. Over the years I've ordered in parts from countries as diverse as England, Germany, Switzerland, Japan, the PRC, lots of USA-built goodies, and of course, Sweden.
With fluke season over, and with a bit of a wait for blackfishing to open up, I've been "casting" about for a project to occupy the time in which I have neither boat nor house work to take care of. The past few rainy weekends have been perfect to scratch my new-reel itch - and the results are as follows in the next few of posts.
What I want to build is a very narrow-framed Abu round reel, without levelwind, so that having to manually "thumb" the line whilst retrieving is kept to a minimum. Think something along the lines of the tiny Accurate Valiant lever-dragger and you'd be close, width and height-wise. The vision is to put this together for use with my Jigging World Ghost Hunter 300gram slow pitch rod, which at only 5'8" overall, is just too cool for school.
Before getting into the components and where they come from, here's a jump-ahead to the completed reel, so that you have a better idea of where we're heading:
Pretty trick, no?
Here's the sum total of the components that will make this reel go:
I'll get into the details and reasoning for each specific part as we go forward. If you have no real interest in such matters, if you just want to go into a store and buy an appropriate reel - I salute you! I like doing that too. But I get far more satisfaction from building and fishing my one-offs, reels that NO ONE else owns. So fair warning, its gonna get very detailed from here forward.
The basis of any good tog reel custom build is the frame. The better the frame, the better the reel will perform. This is because its largely up to the frame to resist any vectored torque loads, thus preventing spool or gearing misalignments. Over the years I've segued first through factory aluminum-plated frames, then custom-modified factory chrome-on-brass versions, and finally to what I will use here - a very trick 6-axis CNC-milled aluminum frame from QTC Manufacturing.
On the right is a recently modded factory chrome-on-brass Abu 4500 frame, with the level wind worm and pawl assembly replaced with a Blakdog Tackle stainless steel cross bar, sitting alongside the QTC custom frame.
I'm fairly sure that most here have probably never heard of QTC Manufacturing. But I can assure you that in Europe, particularly the UK, they were a major vendor to the competitive distance casting crowd. Very, very well known in fact. I say "were" because sadly, one of the principals recently passed away and so the company disbanded - at least the reel-building portion of it, as they are still a pretty decent-sized contract machine shop in England. They always produced small batches of 5500 and 6500-sized frames as a side business. But with some fancy talking, for me they made a run of 4500-sized frames, of which I purchased two. A garnet red one and a jet black version. What a pity that there will never be any others produced. Here's some more pix:
This is the foundation of a reel that will have to punch way above Abu/Sweden's original intended purpose - which was catching large-mouth bass here, and salmon and pike on the other side of the Atlantic.
Next, what to do about gears? Everybody knows that Abu gears, though built of a fairly tough brass alloy, can have a shortened life expectancy when dealing with larger, hard-fighting saltwater fish. It's that way with all small baitcasters that use brass gears. Just a fact of light-tackle life. Luckily, there is a solution - replace the factory brass gearset with a custom cut stainless steel version, from Blakdog Tackle (BDT) in the UK. Though steel gears are a bit more noisy and also a little geary when new, they do break in nicely after a couple of trips and sound/feel not very different from the softer brass versions. It just takes the proper lube, some patience and a batch of decent fish.
The next question is what gear ratio to put into this reel. Lower is always better when fishing for hard-pulling bottom fish. I don't really believe that anyone can question that. Abu used to offer what they called the 4/5/6600 "Winch" series of round reels, which featured stump-pulling 3.8:1 gears - and some of my other reels do carry those. Unfortunately, there are no common-source vendors producing 3.8:1 gears in SS, so I had to go with the 5.3:1 versions - still O.K., I guess, but not the beasts that the lower ratio set is. We shall see how this goes, as I do have a stash of the factory 3.8:1 sets, and it would be no big deal to swap a set of those into this reel. But I really want to sample what the SS gearset provides. Take a look at a comparison of the two metals The SS main has a metal drag washer sitting in it. The brass set is the rare 3.8:1 version, note the far larger and fewer teeth on the pinion.
Here's the SS set by itself - I had to grind the main gear a bit to get proper clearance for the full Smooth-Drag drag washer setup, hence the slightly irregular look of the main's "inside" surface. I could have polished it all smooth and shiny, but my sanity has not yet reached that level of crazy. But it does seem to be trending in that direction, I guess.
End Part One
Over those 50+ years, and particularly over the past 25 or so seasons of using the Interwebs, I've found many, many vendors of factory, one-off and completely custom Abu round reel parts. I have to believe that there is no other reel family that has more of a custom component "cottage" industry than Abu round reels. It's just not possible. Over the years I've ordered in parts from countries as diverse as England, Germany, Switzerland, Japan, the PRC, lots of USA-built goodies, and of course, Sweden.
With fluke season over, and with a bit of a wait for blackfishing to open up, I've been "casting" about for a project to occupy the time in which I have neither boat nor house work to take care of. The past few rainy weekends have been perfect to scratch my new-reel itch - and the results are as follows in the next few of posts.
What I want to build is a very narrow-framed Abu round reel, without levelwind, so that having to manually "thumb" the line whilst retrieving is kept to a minimum. Think something along the lines of the tiny Accurate Valiant lever-dragger and you'd be close, width and height-wise. The vision is to put this together for use with my Jigging World Ghost Hunter 300gram slow pitch rod, which at only 5'8" overall, is just too cool for school.
Before getting into the components and where they come from, here's a jump-ahead to the completed reel, so that you have a better idea of where we're heading:
Pretty trick, no?
Here's the sum total of the components that will make this reel go:
I'll get into the details and reasoning for each specific part as we go forward. If you have no real interest in such matters, if you just want to go into a store and buy an appropriate reel - I salute you! I like doing that too. But I get far more satisfaction from building and fishing my one-offs, reels that NO ONE else owns. So fair warning, its gonna get very detailed from here forward.
The basis of any good tog reel custom build is the frame. The better the frame, the better the reel will perform. This is because its largely up to the frame to resist any vectored torque loads, thus preventing spool or gearing misalignments. Over the years I've segued first through factory aluminum-plated frames, then custom-modified factory chrome-on-brass versions, and finally to what I will use here - a very trick 6-axis CNC-milled aluminum frame from QTC Manufacturing.
On the right is a recently modded factory chrome-on-brass Abu 4500 frame, with the level wind worm and pawl assembly replaced with a Blakdog Tackle stainless steel cross bar, sitting alongside the QTC custom frame.
I'm fairly sure that most here have probably never heard of QTC Manufacturing. But I can assure you that in Europe, particularly the UK, they were a major vendor to the competitive distance casting crowd. Very, very well known in fact. I say "were" because sadly, one of the principals recently passed away and so the company disbanded - at least the reel-building portion of it, as they are still a pretty decent-sized contract machine shop in England. They always produced small batches of 5500 and 6500-sized frames as a side business. But with some fancy talking, for me they made a run of 4500-sized frames, of which I purchased two. A garnet red one and a jet black version. What a pity that there will never be any others produced. Here's some more pix:
This is the foundation of a reel that will have to punch way above Abu/Sweden's original intended purpose - which was catching large-mouth bass here, and salmon and pike on the other side of the Atlantic.
Next, what to do about gears? Everybody knows that Abu gears, though built of a fairly tough brass alloy, can have a shortened life expectancy when dealing with larger, hard-fighting saltwater fish. It's that way with all small baitcasters that use brass gears. Just a fact of light-tackle life. Luckily, there is a solution - replace the factory brass gearset with a custom cut stainless steel version, from Blakdog Tackle (BDT) in the UK. Though steel gears are a bit more noisy and also a little geary when new, they do break in nicely after a couple of trips and sound/feel not very different from the softer brass versions. It just takes the proper lube, some patience and a batch of decent fish.
The next question is what gear ratio to put into this reel. Lower is always better when fishing for hard-pulling bottom fish. I don't really believe that anyone can question that. Abu used to offer what they called the 4/5/6600 "Winch" series of round reels, which featured stump-pulling 3.8:1 gears - and some of my other reels do carry those. Unfortunately, there are no common-source vendors producing 3.8:1 gears in SS, so I had to go with the 5.3:1 versions - still O.K., I guess, but not the beasts that the lower ratio set is. We shall see how this goes, as I do have a stash of the factory 3.8:1 sets, and it would be no big deal to swap a set of those into this reel. But I really want to sample what the SS gearset provides. Take a look at a comparison of the two metals The SS main has a metal drag washer sitting in it. The brass set is the rare 3.8:1 version, note the far larger and fewer teeth on the pinion.
Here's the SS set by itself - I had to grind the main gear a bit to get proper clearance for the full Smooth-Drag drag washer setup, hence the slightly irregular look of the main's "inside" surface. I could have polished it all smooth and shiny, but my sanity has not yet reached that level of crazy. But it does seem to be trending in that direction, I guess.
End Part One
