Grease vs Oil

[bluesnart]

I have watched endless videos on reel maintenance...my question is where to grease and where to oil...main gear shaft oil or grease...spool shaft oil or grease...seems that some reel tolerances or so close...My Penn 710 comes to mind(main gear shaft)that if I use grease on these the reel is extremely sluggish...I use it sparingly...I grease gears and grooves on shafts as well as metal to metal surfaces...I oil bearings...are some reels just gonna be more sluggish then others? Juan

[boon]

Depends on the reel. In the grand scheme of bearings and shafts the maximum speeds a fishing reel will ever experience are the very shallow end of the paddling pool, generally speaking. The only ones that ever go anything resembling "fast" are the spool bearings and the line roller bearing on a spinner.

You can definitely feel the resistance grease adds when turning the handle on a lighter-duty reel. Whether this makes a difference to "feel" is probably a game of percentages - if the reel is very light and easy to turn originally, it will be much more noticeable than, say, a big heavy reel that always took some effort to spin.

As a rule of thumb, oil on anything to do with the spool, grease on the rest. The trick is finding a nice slippery grease that stays where you put it without being excessively tacky. I think we're slowly moving away from the use of heavy marine greases on anything other than large game reels.

[Keta]

I usualy oil spool bearings  grease all others.

[MarkT]

Oil the spool bearings and the spool shaft where it goes through the pinion gear. Everything else gets grease. No grease on the spool shaft or inside the pinion!

[bluesnart]

The reel I'm using as an example is a Penn 710...which turned slowly compared to my 700...both spin fisher models...the larger reel spins freely after maintenance...the smaller 710 is very stiff...I use Penn Precision Grease...sickier then say the Cals I have...I think I'll redo the spool shaft and main gear shaft(which has a very tight close tolerance) and see if that helps

[Keta]

Spinners are different, I prefer to avoid them but when I do work on one I put light or thined down grease on the internals.

[bluesnart]

Would silicon grease be a good option...what do you thin it with...oil?

[JasonGotaProblem]

Would silicon grease be a good option...what do you thin it with...oil?

Silicone based grease is almost impossible to remove. Which sounds great, until the next time you go to service it.

And it's also usually super thick and sticky. Or at least the few I'm familiar with

[Midway Tommy]

I grease everything on a spinning reel, including the main bearing, a little on the main shaft and inside the pinion worm gear tube, but I'll add a little synthetic oil to it, too. I prefer the added protection a little grease gives and I don't care if it slows the cranking down a little bit. When the bail is open the line free flows just fine and if you use a high quality synthetic grease like Super Lube and don't  pack it full a half dozen cranks will loosen everything up  quickly if it's been sitting around for awhile.

[MarkT]

Oops, my comment was for a conventional reel, not a spinner!

[Keta]

My first one two Mark.

[bluesnart]

Well I've got a lot to work with...think about and experiment with...thanks for all the great information...Juan

[bluesnart]

In conclusion
Disassembled the 710...wiped off grease on spool shaft, replaced with mixture of oil and light cover of Cals Grease...did the same on X wind gear surface...much better...now gonna wax spool add backing and load either mono or braid and FISH...thanks for all your comments they were very helpful
Juan

[jurelometer]

Grease comes in varying thicknesses.  Cal's brown is NLGI 2, which is the most common thickness by far.  You can buy thinner greases, NLGI 1 would be a good place to start.  As you go down to 0, 00, etc, they become  more like really thick oils.

Greases are mostly oil.  The magic is in coming up with a formulation that keeps the oil and thickener blended.  When greases separate, the oil migrates out, leaving a hardening residue from the thickener. This is how greases fail over time in reels.

While it is popular here, and folks have their favorite recipes, adding oil or solvents to grease is simply a crude DIY attempt to change the thickness, and is unlikely to work as well as simply using the correct grade for the job.

I think that we get away with this approach because as Boon has noted, reels are not very demanding pieces of machinery when it comes to lubricant performance.

Spinning reels put a lot of their mass into motion when winding, including linear/reversing (spool oscillation). We rely on inertia to keep everything smooth when working lures, so too much and/or too thick a grease can be more noticeable in spinning reels.

But with modern braid, all types of reels have become  smaller for a given load capacity, so I do agree that there are probably more cases where lighter grease could be appropriate. 

Me-I don't use spinners much, And I will take a tiny bit more winding resistance to lengthen the maintenance period.   I'd have to dig around to find my NLGI 1. So there is also a bit of personal preference involved.

-J

[akfish]

Simple answer: Grease on things that move slowly or don't move at all; oil on things that move rapidly.