I lapped my stainless gears

[locknut]

Joel good on ya for having a go, I am sure the amount of material you removed was negligable. To compare what you did to adding sand to your engine was I think a bit extreme and the member who made those comments has come very close in tone to the rubbish that gets kicked around in those other forums. A moderation in tone would be much appreciated. Lets face it the manufacture of reel gears is done the cheapest way a factory can get away with and us still purchase the reel. So in other words perfection it aint. A bit of smoothing IMO will come to no harm. Come on we are all family here we all need to speak to one another with that in mind.

[Robert Janssen]

Enough. This has gone far enough and beyond.

What- WHAT- is the problem here?! What here is so difficult to understand?

Read the post, people. If you do not understand, read the post again.
And if you do not understand some of the words or terminology, look them up. Learn them.

Jeezus.

I was asked to explain, and did. Accelerated wear. That's all.

Any inferred derogatory tone or downward spiral of this thread is of your collective perception and contribution. Read it yourself and see. To be honest, it seems as though very few read the posts properly.

Some of the following  rationalizations and comments- not leastly the last one- are so seriously out of whack they not warrant reply. Yet, this thread keeps coming up again.

It is very disenheartening.


HOWEVER, and back to the subject at hand, some of you may be surprised to learn that gears are most definitely not cheaply or easily made. Manufacturers can put a great deal of work into proper gear design. Penn for example uses a CNC hobber running a carbide toothed hob, holding tolerances within a few thousandths of an inch. A machine like that is very expensive indeed, and such hobs cost many hundreds if not a thousand bucks apiece. They claim to change hobs weekly.
Abu uses something similar, and includes a crowning parameter in the ten seconds or so it takes to make a pinion. Cal Sheets makes his own gears too, by shaping. Cal Sheets conversions are not cheap. Wonder why.
If some of you are experiencing diffculty with  die cast zinc gears in cheap reels, i can't help you. You need to buy better reels.

I gotta go. I'm sitting here down by the water's edge, trying to enjoy an hour of fishing, and i really am becoming convinced that this is a complete waste of my time.

I wonder a few things sometimes though:

I wonder why, having seen the tremendous wealth of knowledge in the responses here, why nobody could answer the OP's original enquiry when he posted it. I also wonder if, during the time this thread has been going, any one of you has even bothered to read or look up things like gears, lapping, gear flanks... And i wonder if anyone has the gumtion to go phone up Penn or Cal or Accurate for instance, and ask them how they feel about using grinding paste on their gears.

I seriously doubt it.

.

[Pro Reel]

Robert, you obviuosly have a wealth of information about gears and machine work. I have often heard of folks doing everything from polishing each gear tooth with hair wheels on a dremmel to simply putting polishing compound oir even toothpaste on the rgears and then running them at high speed to try to improve smoothness of a reels cranking. I have never put much faith in this as my opinion is that once a gear set is worn enough that the cranking feels rough, the gears should be replaced. However, there are times when a new gear set isn't available for some reels. Do have knowlegde of a way to smooth out the wear on slightly worn gears in a way that will make the reel feel smooth again without hurting the reel? This is what the post should be about. He tried something, it might not be right, it might acelerate the wear process, but what can we do if we can't get new gears?

[saltydog]

Robert you call Penn for me and tell them the quality control from china sucks,I cut my finger the other day on there perfectly formed quality controlled gears,but it's ok I took sandpaper to them and now there fine.

[Joel.B]

There is a man who is about as decorated at long-range shooting as anyone could ever hope to be- his name is David Tubb.  David now has some pretty decent products out there from complete rifles to gunsmithing goodies http://www.davidtubb.com/

One of his products is Final Finish. This is basically 50 unloaded bullets in the caliber of your need. 10 bullets each coated in lapping compound, from coarse to fine. You load these yourself, fire them through your old or new gun starting with larger grit and finishing with the finest - stopping to clean between each grit. Not exactly a new concept- smiths have been doing this by hand for centuries- even with top-shelf custom barrels. The idea is to erase the imperfections left behind by the tooling. As the tooling gets worn from cutting the same deal over/over- it gets pretty rough and leaves scars.

When Final Finish came out - the "Experts" were up in arms over this deal. They howled at whoever would listen -"DO NOT USE THIS IN YOUR RIFLES- IT WILL WIPE THE RIFLING RIGHT OUT"  "ACCELERATED WEAR, TAKES MANY THOUSANDS OF ROUNDS OF LIFE FROM YOUR RIFLE!!!"  but when asked, none had ever used it.  But soon enough this stuff was known to be bad for your guns- had a bad reputation built by those who never even tried it because they knew better and did not want to ruin their hi-dollar barrels.  

I had a $200 Savage 22-250 varminter that I bought at a show. I did a trigger job on it and bedded the stock, re-cut the crown and still could not get it to shoot better than 2" at 100yds.   So I had a box of this Final Finish that was given to me- so what the heck, gave it  a run.    First thing I noticed after use was that cleaning patches ran through barrel extremely easily vs before- this actually worried me.   I set rifle up on a bench and sent five rounds down range that were all touching at 100yds. About as good as you can hope for. I was amazed.  I used the product in a .22 rifle I had, and also a 300wsm, all showed improvements but none as much as that 22-250, not even close. But they are all easier to clean and you can shoot more shots between cleaning before fouling becomes a problem.    I have put 3k rounds through that 22-250 since (notorious barrel burners) and I have yet to notice any signs of accuracy falling off.  I have used this product now on many a rifle, have not always achieved better accuracy, but have yet to ruin any barrels with it.  I have friends that decided to try it- all their friends tried it- not one bad word to be said about the product from anyone who has actually used it.

Yet still, to his day if you mention Final Finish on any smithing forum- there will be many an "expert" to come out against it- and you can ask every one of them if they have used it same answers "no but I know a guy who did....." or just "no, I would never do that to one of my guns"

I am guessing that "lapping" these gears with similar compounds is not much difference. You can scratch a dry gear with your fingernail and feel roughness left by the tooling. I really don't think that these compounds are coarse enough- the resistance strong enough- nor the amount of time being lapped long enough to do anything short of smoothing down these tooling marks.  I think you'd really have to be determined to actually reduce the useful lifetime of one of these gears.  

If there is a better way to quiet these stainless gears and smooth them out- I would love to try it.  

If it turns out that I screwed something up- you can bet I will post about here


My one concern so far is that polishing with McGuires left them too smooth- now does not hold onto the grease (Cals and blue Penn) as well as rough gears do. I have yet to try it with stiffer grease. If anyone can recommend a grease that would be great.

[redsetta]

It appears we've explored this particular topic as fully as we might at this point.
Further ideas or contributions on similar topics could perhaps be posted as new topics/threads.
Thanks for everyone's input - it's no doubt all sincerely meant.
All the best, Justin