SoCal brand fishing reels

[steelfish]

Have anyone seen and service or open these reels before?

I searched online and the only information I found is that the socal factory/store went outta business in 2019 and sold the inventory at 75% off or something, anyway, I have one for repair and of course I couldnt find any schematic of the reel, the drag dial preset knob is completely frozen, so I dont know if I can force it to release with a plier or not, I dont want to break anything specially since there will be no place to buy replacement parts, I dont know either what reel this was trying to clone, the aluminium feels like plastic, you know, that kind of alloy that feels cheap and 3x lighter than normal aluminium.

[boon]

Generic chinese clone of an Accurate with whatever brand they were printing that day. Looks like maybe someone put a Shimano t-bar on it though?

Remove the blue bit in the middle of the program dial then they're usually held in by a snap ring or circlip. Make sure to check the post on the sideplate that the drag cam sits on for damage.

Apart from being impossible to get any non-standard parts (anything that isn't bearings) for they're usually not too bad to work on.

[JasonGotaProblem]

Looks a lot like the "omoto" reel that was mixed in with a box I bought from Bryan Young's estate. Fits boon's description too.

[steelfish]

Remove the blue bit in the middle of the program dial then they're usually held in by a snap ring or circlip. Make sure to check the post on the sideplate that the drag cam sits on for damage.

- that was my starting plan too, it seems that it will be the only way to check whats wrong with the preset knob, getting to it from the inside, thanks amigo

Apart from being impossible to get any non-standard parts (anything that isn't bearings) for they're usually not too bad to work on.

- I already told the owner that this might be ending like a nice 12oz sinker

[Gfish]

Heat and penetrating oil and patience. Looks nice on the outside like the owner took care of it there, but didn't open it up. So, SoCal is a place in China🤔?

[Dominick]

We got confidence in you Alex.  Keep reporting progress.  Dominick

[boon]

Looks a lot like the "omoto" reel that was mixed in with a box I bought from Bryan Young's estate. Fits boon's description too.

Omoto are quite different. They had a run of fairly awful lever drags (Poseidon/KAM series), followed by a chunky and slightly less terrible series of reels that have been discussed at some length here and are usually called Poseidon S but sold under a variety of other names like Qualia, then they erm, took some heavy inspiration from the small Avets (Omoto VS-10) before finally producing some genuinely quite novel reels like the Triple and NTS which seem to be a curious hybrid of a small Avet and the Taiwanese jigging reels like Jigging Master and Maxel. I haven't been hands-on with the newer ones but my evaluation of older ones was solid design, great machining, awful metallurgy.

[steelfish]

I opened up this reel and to me this reel is a bad copy of an Accurate twin drag boss reel, the spool is attached to the sideplate the same way of an accurate, I took out the spool, the handle, gears, etc until could reach the CAM/drag dial knob and took them up as complete assembly.




then, I leave them on a bath of wd-40/liquid wrench for few hours, I tried to separate the parts with no avail, them applied a bit of heat if a heat gun at max and while the metal was hot I hit them with a wooden tool and voila !! they got separated 




while I had those parts on my hand I check them out and noticed they are about to fail on the reel, which is too bad because 99% sure there will be no replacement parts to fix the reel when that happen, as you can see the pins on both ends of the CAM are worn because of the bad quality of the metals





hopefully it fails on a good fish for at least have a good story to share when the reel got broken on a monsta' fish

for now, the reel is back in action and have a good drag