Below is an email that I sent to Abu Garcia via their web-site contact form.
I am writing a detailed historical picture book about the Golden Age of the Spin-cast reel. I have questions regarding any information of possible patent-sharing or collaboration in the design of vintage spin-casting reels made by Johnson and those made by Abu Garcia. The similarities between the designs and early products as well as those that evolved later are very close. I have interviewed employees who worked at the original Johnson plant during those days--who have their own ideas about this, but I do not have anything very concrete yet. I'd like to get this information right. If someone in the know regarding the historical facts regarding this can be accessed, I'd love to hear from them. By-the-way, I am a life-long, second-generation user of Abu Garcia products.
Best Regard, Doug (PapaD Wright)
I have not received a reply. If I don't, I will follow-up with phone calls and letters. I am also actively pursuing an various collectors and those who have websites, books, or resouces regarding vintage fishing gear. There appears to be a dirge of accurate information about spin-casting history and manufacturing chronology. Hopefully someone will or a number of people will co,,ectively come forward with that information. I do not claim any particular expertise about spin-casting reals other than a lifetime of use and interest in them and this inconsistently.
I do know how to disassymble, clean, and fix most models. They are very logically designed and the parts are very durable. The early reals are made almost entirely of metal. There are a couple of aprts which are made pf some type of synthetic which I judge to be nylon. Nylon 66 was among the most successful early petroleum-distilled synthetic materials. The stuff is tough as nails, won't rust, and hard to break even under duress. Even if it does break, almost any epoxy glue will weld it back together as permanetly as the original as the chemical reaction fuses the synthetic together as if it is part of the original material. I am no glue expert either, but I know this from a lifetime of that coincides with the development and use of Nylon 66 and other plastics in everyday applications.
An interesting side-bar about my experience concerning Nylon 66 is related more with the hunting and shooting sports than with fishing reels, althoguh the time period is parallel. Remington Arms was a pretty forward-thinkin compan back in the fifities and sixties. My Dad, althoug largely a traditionalist, was also a great beleiver in the technology that came along during his lifetime. When Remington introduced their Nylon 66 semi-automatic .22 rifle in 1960, or there abouts, he felt that it being light and fashionable that it would be the idea rifle for Mom. Mon was a classy lady with simple but good taste and she was tickled to death to receive such a gift, although I am guessing that she suspected the same thing that we kids suspected about her gift--that it provided a good excuse for Dad to purchase one of these much-talked-about and somewhat controversial rifles that smacked of play-toys or BB guns, without chinking his own masculine image. A plastic gun just was not that fitting for a man's man, whch my dad certainly was. But Mom's gun it was and whenever she went outing with us, as she often did, she could plink with the best of us. She was actually a dead-on shot with that Nylon 66 .22.
Over the years, my next-oldest brother and I borrowed Mom's Nylon 66. We put it through its paces in every way, dragging it through snow and tundra and climes of every imaginable variety. We cleaned our guns, but not fanatically. Today, over a half a century after its aquisition, that old plastic rifle is as functional as ever. It was never abused. It does show some wear with nicks and scratches here and there on the Nylon stock, but it has out-worn many conventional wooden stock rifles of lessor age. Although Remington discontinued production of the Nylon 66 rifle, it was nto that long ago, and I understand that it was among the most popular and prolifically produced semi-automatic .22 rifles in history.
I have aquired several of these good old rifles over the years found stuck back and forgotten in shops and estate sales. They are always a pleasnat discovery for me. They have become popular collector items for the firearms afficiandos and those who merely wnat a good lightweight semi-auto .22 rifle. The military style rifle sights offered by the Nylon 66 are dead-on and easy to see and use. I beleive hat only the Remington 10/22 has outstripped the popularity of the Nylon 66--and this because of an inherent design feature that renders the 10/22 a bit more versatile when customizing with aftermarket accessories.
But for the durality of the substance it is made of, the Nylon 66 bodes well for the same qualities whereever it is used--and it is used in the early Johnson reels for those few parts that are not made of metal. I am merely guessing that the pair of inventor-owners who first produced the Johnson spin-cast fishing reels chose Nylon for these few parts for a good reason--an d they chose well.
The drag design used on the Johnson Century 100 was apprently found lacking, as it was soon replaced with a differnt design. The reason cited for the change was to provide a greater range of drag tension, but my guess is that the original design smply was not the best design. While simplicity is a desirable feature when it comes to engineering and manufacturing, any mechanism has to perform up to the satisfaction of its most-ardent users. The early Johnson Century--particularly the Century Model 100 (minus the letter A following the 100 model disignation)-- was and is lacking. It is the first thin g that I check when I pick up one of these old reels. It is about the only thing that can go wrong with them, short of missing parts.
Some of the perceived desgin flaw in the 100's drag may be the user's lack of understanding as to how it is suppose to work. You have to look at the mechanism inside and out to truly understand how the resistance is applied to the spool in order to provide less drag or more. The odds are that someone over the years has disassembled a given reel for cleaning and then failed to put it back together correctly. Several seemingly non-critical nuances about the way the spool and drag linkage are placed are in fact dritical to the proper function of the drag. Further, the design seems to have been tweaked during the manufacture of these early models, which means that a user may find several variants to contend with while tryng to get the placement right. Without properly noting the correct placement during disassembly, a user has a fifty-fifty chance of choosing the wrong way--and this at two or three different points n reassembly. I do, however, feel that in most cases, the drag can be made to work correctly by the proper placement of the original parts. The exceptions to this would be in the event of a bent brass link or a broken nylon yoke around the spool, which is rare.
In subsequent posts, I will detail the correct assembly of these reels with photographs to help understand the procedures and nuances of each variant and the misplacements to look for. There must be some factory-provided user schematics for each of these reels, but I have nto found them. I have found links to at least soem of the original operator manuals for these reels and hav efound that reading them explains many of the most important--yet non-intuitive cautions about the function and placement of the parts. Men, especially able-bodied and sef-sufficient fishermen, are probably not those most prone to have read the factory-provided instructions--whcih may account for why so many of these reels are not put together correctly.
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Posted by: UGG ブーツ アウトレット | 09/08/2013 at 05:33 PM
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Posted by: ミネトンカ ムートンブーツ | 09/08/2013 at 05:33 PM