[Bill McIntyre]

I've been reading about them, but had never seen one before today. Robin Cadiz got his new reel in the mail and brought it over to fill it with the Q-Power 600 pound Spectra kite line, so I got to see what it looks like. I know there are other threads on the reel, but since I have some specs on it, I thought I'd start a new one in case anyone was tired of looking for information in the old ones.

We got 196 feet of line on it, which is all anyone should need. You can see that its pretty full, but it wasn't mounted on a gun so it was hard to wind it very tight. He can always remove some later.

The bare reel weighed 3 3/4 oz, and the mount that attaches to the gun weighed 1/4 oz.

With the line on it, the entire thing weighed 8 1/4 oz, but I'm not sure how meaningful that is since the line is probably pretty close to neutral in the water.

I'm no engineer, but the design looks very simple and good. The stainless reels have a pin going through the axle that fits into a slot in the nylon bushing, and its a slight pain in the ass when assembling it. This one had a flat spot on the side of the axle, and a matching flat spot on the bushing. The drag nut has stainless threads on the inside, and they thread onto the threaded axle.

The line guide has a stainless inside surface to prevent wear.

The reel snaps pretty firmly into the mount that screws to the gun, and of course the mount has a curved surface to fit on the round barrel of a Euro gun. But if I mount one on the flat bottom surface of a wood gun, I think I'll just skip the mount. Daryl Wong has mounted a few, and he said he just grinds off those protrusions that slide onto the mount to make a flat surface, and then attaches it to the gun with inserts and machine screws.

Of course I haven't seen it tested in action, but it looks to me like a great reel.

PS: I know some of you always use a float line. Don't bother to tell me again.