I only recently starting fishing with these 14 ft. long poles, so handling these beasts was new to me. I've gotten better with them,and now was in the process of setting up my boat for spider rigging. I got some more 14ft BnM poles, and bought 4 more little Shakespeare reels.
When you're spider rigging with these long rods, the reels don't seem all that important. They just hold the line. You're not casting, and you really only have to pick up the pole to bring the fish in to the boat. Whether you swing it around to your fishing partner, or whether you point the rod tip to the heavens and pendulum the fish straight to you. You don't do a lot of reeling, if any.
But what you do need is a good drag. You need to be able to set it tothe perfect drag level. Tight enough to be able to get a good hookset, and loose enough for the fish to pull line to prevent it from breaking.
And, if you're fishing three feet of water with a 14 foot rod, it's nice to be able to set the drag a little lighter. That way some line can release when you do point that rod tip to the sky, to get the fish in the boat, with out having that fish dangling up there nine feet in the air.
That first Synergy worked well for all these purposes. Little did I know that was an anomaly. The four new ones I bought had little to no available drag at any setting!
I figured out why that first one was "different" once I took all five reels apart. The first one had two friction plates inside it, and the four new ones only had one. At their highest drag setting, line could still be pulled out way too easy on those four new reels. Two of those four felt like they had no drag at all except for the drag of the clicker. You could not even do a hook set.
They were worthless to me without a drag. So I figured I'd try to take them apart to see if anything could be done to fix them. Couldn't hurt, and if I was not able to fix them I'd just throw them out anyway.
As it turns out, it was easy enough to fix them. I thought I'd share my adventure with you below just in case anyone else runs into the same thing.
Five reels, only one with "real drag"!
First remove the front cover by unscrewing the part where the line comes out of, you know, the part you take off to get at the spool when you put on new line.
Remove the screw on the other side of the reel handle, and remove the handle.
The guts all pull out like you're cleaning a fish!
Now the pain in the butt. There's a tiny little circlip that you have to remove. You can use a small screw driver but be careful, the circlip will go flying. I had to search for two of them across the floor of my house. I'm actually shocked I found them cause they are so small. If you use your thumnail to hold down the spring before you remove it it'll give you a fighting chance.
With the previous (tiny) circlip removed, the front comes off, and this big circlip is exposed. Remove it and everything falls apart. Take time to see how it is all put together, so that you know what goes where.
Once of the parts includes this wavy washer. The fix is to put more waves in it. Use a long nose pliers to bend it. I put around 5 more bends in it. But don't go overboard, otherwise it'll be a real "drag" (too much drag). If you put too much bend in the washer, you can use the long nose to flatten it a bit.
Put it all back together the same way you took it apart. The only pain was getting that small circlip back in. Use your thumb nail to hold the spring down and use your long nose pliers to push the circlip into place. Be patient and it'll all work out just fine. Good luck.
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