| Penn 525 no anti-reverse dog assembly?
Last trip I went out I had one of my reels take a crap on me. No biggie as I was able to tear it down in the galley and get it working. Upon opening the reel, I saw that some maintenance was in order.
After reading up on the posts covering reel teardown. (Props to the authors of those threads), I felt pretty confident opening up the reels. For the past three days, I've been tearing down each reel and giving it a good grease/oiling.
Some impressions:
The penn 525 mag reel has some seriously large drags compared to most reels in its category. The HT100 washers were as large as those found on my baja special. One strange thing I noticed was there is no anti-reverse dog assembly on the reel. It completely relies on the anti-reverse bearing. I'm questioning the reliability of this feature as I run 25lb line on the reel and am doubtful that the bearing will withstand heavy use. Can anyone add insight to this? Anyone with failures?
To my dismay, the baja special drags/washers were arranged in the wrong order. (Drag washer against drag washer while the SS washers were all jammed up against the sleeve). Shame on you penn for delivering this product back to me like this. I had sent it in to recieve the bearing upgrade and this is how they send it back to me. Anyone who has a baja special may want to check the arrangment of the drag washers.
All the penn reels were also treated with shimano drag grease on the washers. What an improvement Nothing wrong with running the drags dry but now they are buttery smooth. Am I sacrificing increased drag pressure by greasing the drags?
Bravo to Daiwa and the design of the saltist reel. Easy to open up and gain access to the internals. Although on two of the reels, I could not get the sleeve off completely off. It seems to jam half way up. Anybody here have the same problem or do I just need to force it off? Also, can the stock drag washers found in the reel be greased or should I leave them as they are?
Newells too are a snap to do maintenance on.
Abu-garcia - only partially opened up the one I have. Seems easy enough but did not completely tear it down as it still relatively new and it looked fine from what I saw.
Remember kids always grease the screws. I learned the hard way a while ago that no grease=busted screws.
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