Luxor 3 - Custom

[LFEngineering]

Ironically my Luxor reel building journey started with a Penn 706z.  I picked up the Penn in fall of 2024, fished it and fell in love with classic reels.  Not long after I heard a podcast talking about the origin of Van Staal and how it was basically a reimagined Luxor/Crack.  I immediately hit up eBay in search for reel to work on.  I bid on a few reels and managed to land 3 of them.  2 Crack 300's (which were WAY to nice to modify) and a slightly beat up Luxor #3.

After some research here on the forum I found a breakdown of the Crack 300.  Using it as a guide I stripped and cleaned the Luxor.
I knew from the beginning I wanted to do some kind of drag upgrade as well as drilling & slotting, bailless conversion, a mechanical once-over and some new paint. 

Mods & Notes:

Bail:  I removed the bail components as wouldn't need them anymore which helped lighten everything up a bit.

Slots:  Having a machining background I opted to setup the rotor on the Bridgeport & use a indexable holder to precisely mill the slots.  They are 1/4" and the process went fairly well.
 
Drilling:  Spool already had factory holes, but I opted to open them up a bit.  I did that by hand on the bench.

Drag:  Having had both my 706z and the Luxor apart at the same time I quickly realized the Penn drag washers fit in the Luxor.  I picked up a set of Carbontex drag washers on ebay.  I added one to the back of the spool, replacing a felt spacer.  I milled 2 slots in the spool and added one eared washer to gain one more friction plane.  The stack-up is now drag washer - spool - drag washer - eared washer - drag washer - slotted washer - nut.

Main Bearing: I ended up having to press off the pinion gear to replace the main bearing.  I tried to mitigate any issues by making a tool that went inside the pinion shaft to support it during pressing.  Unfortunately I did end up mushrooming the top of the pinion shaft and I had to refit it during rebuild.  Ended up going with a stainless steel sealed bearing for the replacement. 

Hardware: Per the recommendation of the Crack 300 breakdown and re-tapped all the hardware to 5-40 and replaced with stainless screws.

Paint:  For color selection & durability I don't think Cerakote can be beat, my only complaint is it's not cheap.  2 colors + shipping is like $80 bucks, but if your going to go custom why stop at paint.  The original reels seem to come in a few different colors, mostly I've seen light & dark green as well as plain gray.  I wanted something in that family so I found "northern lights" from Cerakote.  It's supposed to have a green/blue color shift and it reminded me of those old reel colors (as opposed to todays black or silver).  My original plan was to do the Northern Lights blue with silver as my secondary color. As soon as the blue hit the body it showed this beautiful gold/bronze undertone.  Fortunately I had already planned to use the burnt bronze color on my Penn so I had it in stock.  it was a no-brainer to switch the secondary color to bronze to complement the gold undertone on the blue.  The pictures hardly do it justice when it comes to sunlight. (It's going to be fished so I didn't bother to paint under the reel seat as it'll be blocked and I needed a place to secure it during painting)   

Weight: I did manage to loose 10% weight after the modifications.

Lastly I needed a knob and the Geomexus offerings seemed to be decent both in quality and price.

I can't wait to get it spooled up and ready for some backwater action striper fishing in New England this year.

[oc1]

Man, that's beautiful.  You have some serious imagination, skills and equipment.  I'm hoping it won't be your last reel project.