Penn Rival 15 - take apart and review

[beachbob]

Bought one of these in left hand retrieve.  First thing was to remove the level wind.  Pulled off the clicker side plate, pulled out the spool. 

Hmm, the Penn website says the Rival reels have "mechanical" braking, but i don't see any centrifugal brakes.  Called Penn and was told that "mechanical" means using your thumb!  They'll be changing their website info on the Rivals.  So, NO brakes of any kind at all.  No problem for me.

Back to the level wind removal, the worm gear and worm shield are locked in on the gear plate side, so I removed the handle and the 2 screws on the gear box and the 2 screws on the side plate frame, but the side plate wouldn't budge.  Hmm.  I spent a good 15 minutes trying to understand why the side plate wouldn't lift off when all the screws were removed.  Finally I twisted and lifted off the chromed metal side band and underneath was a small phillips head screw.  Now the side plate came off and revealed that the worm gear shaft was held in with an E-clip.  Popped the clip and the worm gear and its shield slipped off.  I will say that the innards of the Rival - the gears and HT100 drags, etc - all look darned good, which was a bit of a surprise for a $50 reel.  Everything was slathered in Penn blue grease, too.  Put it all back together, cleaned off the frame where the level wind worm shield was with alcohol and covered the holes with black electrical tape.

Pulling out the entire worm makes sure there's no drag on the spool for fast spinning.  There's still large and and small nylon gears on the clicker side that do nothing, but I left them on for now.  There appears to be some room on that clicker side plate to allow adding static mags to tame the aluminum spool, if need be.

I loaded the spool with 16# Ande Tournament and a 40# shock leader, clamped the reel to a new Fiblink 10' 2-6oz surf rod, clipped on a 4oz sputnik and did an easy toss over at the ball field and hit 77 yards, next cast was 89 yards.  No birds nest or fluffing during the casts.

The acid test is a good day/night at the beach, getting the gear beat up a bit, landing some fishies, but so far there's promise for both reel and rod.