Lateral thinking

There is a box or rather a few boxes and some bags, of bits for old reels. This treasure trove lies in the corner of the fishing room and every now and again I take a notion to investigate the contents and see if I can fix up some of the sad old winding mechanisms. Today was one of those days.

I have hundreds of bits for old Winfield multiplier reels in the boxes. In amongst the jumble I found what was basically a whole ‘Surf caster’. Back in the ’70’s these were about all I could afford so between the reels I bought then and various bits and pieces I have found over the intervening years there are a lot of parts of reels. I fiddled about with it for a while, swapping out parts or just making sure they were the right bits to start with.

In the end I had a reel which was complete but still didn’t work. The spool didn’t want to turn and if it did it made a horrible noise. The gears were OK, I had checked them out and they were fine. In the end I figured out that the clicker on the side plate was broken and this was jamming the spool. A frantic search of the boxes failed to reveal a spare side plate. What to do?

Then it struck me, in a polythene bag somewhere in the boxes I had bits for Bass fisher reels. I was pretty sure both reels shared the same end plates, the only difference being the sticker on the outside. Sure enough, when I found the Bass fisher parts and compared the end plates they were indeed identical. It was the work of minutes to swap the end plates and bingo! The reel worked perfectly.

A small victory perhaps but I now have a nice old reel which will live in the boot of the car for use in emergencies. We are just at the beginning of 6 weeks of lockdown here in Ireland so any positivity is welcome and a bit of lateral thinking allowed me to bring a sad old reel back to life. I confessed to feeling a little bit chuffed this evening!