Black Pearl's gears for 500- 505 & 112H

[Bryan Young]

thanks Alan.  Good to work with honest people.

[broadway]

    It's tough getting mad at an honest guy ... looking forward to seeing your solution.
Thanks for the update
Dom

[floating doc]

Hey, it was easy, everyone would do it!  I'm good.   

[Alto Mare]

Penn 505 pinions also fail under the same conditions.
The main gears are fine, we just need stronger pinions.
You did good so far Alan, we should all be grateful, catching these at the right time was also a good move.
The 113h and 114H gear set were put to some crazy tests by me and held up just fine, your guys know what they're doing, I have no doubts they will make this right.
Sal

[Alto Mare]

Alto, I do not know if this is a repeated question but, didn you notice a change in the drag range from the lower gears than the higher gears?

BEN

Ben, if you're talking about the Jigmaster,  the drags on the higher gears have been modified to 1+5, we also have octagonal inserts for those, the stock Jigmasters 500 have 1+3 drags.
This is what I got with my test:
All three gears performance was very similar up to 10lbs, above 10 lbs. the set with Bryan's washers stayed smooth and so did Lee's inserts, actually the inserts felt a little smoother to me, but not by much, the stock Penn 505 was also smooth, but the 4:1 felt rough at around 12lbs. and really rough at 15lbs.

All three high speed pinion gears failed at 15 to 18 lbs., the lower 4:1 pinion survived

My test was done by pulling rolling weight by turning the handle ( wagon and bricks), the reel was loaded with 20lbs. mono, pinions failed before the line did.
Another observation I made was that a counterbalanced handle was easier to use than the others, I tested both.
I'm thinking counterbalanced for the smaller reels and up to the Jigmaster might be a good thing.
Sal
I added the 505  later on, just to confirm that my test was accurate.

[Ron Jones]

I'm using Lee's octagon insert in a 4:1 steel gear 112H wide and it has fished way over 20 pounds with no issues, the slow gears may just be the awnser for high drag numbers. A 5:1 narrow Jigmaster fishing 45 pound braid would still be great at 15 pounds.
Ron

[Alto Mare]

I'm using Lee's octagon insert in a 4:1 steel gear 112H wide and it has fished way over 20 pounds with no issues, the slow gears may just be the awnser for high drag numbers. A 5:1 narrow Jigmaster fishing 45 pound braid would still be great at 15 pounds.
Ron

I'm with you on this Ron.
I have lots of information on these, the problem is that it's spread out and at times it's hard to find .
Maybe I should ask Bryan to keep it all together on one page.
Here is some past information on 4:1 stock pinions and gears:

http://alantani.com/index.php?topic=7564.0

By the way, when testing Alan C. gears, after they failed twice at around 15lbs., I wanted to make sure that my test wasn't too much, so I tested a stock jigmaster. I was only able to go to 15 lbs., but the reel started to get rough at 11/12lbs. and really rough at 15lbs. The pinion did good though.
The bottom line is that the 4:1 could handle 18/20lbs, I've seen it myself, but you need inserts or Bryan's kit to bring you there, a stock 4:1 with 1+3 drag configuration won't be able to.
On another note, I mentioned that one of the tooth came off on the pinion, right by the reinforcing ring, this might not mean much. I inspected many pinion gears and some have that last tooth already missing, there isn't much meat left on some, after they cut the grove for the shaft. Not all are the same there.
Sal

[BMITCH]

Sal, thanks for all the tests and input. We should all be very grateful to the fact that you do these tests and we are no finding out the hard way...while on the water or worse yet on the fish of a lifetime thanks again for all your hard work, you have a true passion for this.
  Alan C. All is well. Im sure your source will find a work around. These are very nice gears and the drags were talking about maybe we should all think of a lower gear ratio. I don't think say a 4.8 or 4.5 to 1 ratio would really be noticed. After all isn't the stock Penn 505 just slightly shy of exactly 5:1? Maybe for a reason. Keep us posted and can't wait to see what you guys come up with.
Bob

[floating doc]

IMO, there are several factors in this.  there's a lot of variation in the quality of the materials. Look at the eBay "stainless steel" gears with their weird plating. Titanium might hold up but is probably not suitable for the salt water environment and machine and material costs would be ridiculous.

There may be a higher quality stainless steel (I defer to our resident experts on this), but again the production and materials costs may be too high.

I agree going to a slightly lower gear ratio makes the most sense. There's no way to make the main gear larger and the small pinion looks like a tough job.

I have to say that however this comes out, I'm glad to be taking part. I looked at the new Penn star drag reels before starting my 112HN, and didn't like any of the options. I'm priced out of the torque, and I don't like the anti reverse on the fathom.



he role of an innovator is often very difficult. Edison didn't invent the lightbulb, he just made the first commercially successful one. As is well known, it took a lot of attempts.

[Alto Mare]

Sal, thanks for all the tests and input. We should all be very grateful to the fact that you do these tests and we are no finding out the hard way...while on the water or worse yet on the fish of a lifetime thanks again for all your hard work, you have a true passion for this.
  Alan C. All is well. Im sure your source will find a work around. These are very nice gears and the drags were talking about maybe we should all think of a lower gear ratio. I don't think say a 4.8 or 4.5 to 1 ratio would really be noticed. After all isn't the stock Penn 505 just slightly shy of exactly 5:1? Maybe for a reason. Keep us posted and can't wait to see what you guys come up with.
Bob

We are all in this together Bob, everything we've been doing here, has been done as a team.
I spoke to Alan before he posted about this and he was already working on it, he has a few good ideas already.

We could speculate all we want, but let's just step back for now and let them do their thing.

Sal

[jigmaster501]

This is why I feel a regular 4:1 gear would be best in Stainless. We will have the benefits of a stronger gear that will last a very long time and not shred. If we have to go to 4.4 : 1 so be it.  As long as the gears are strong and reliable.

Hope this works as these gears are needed with the stronger drags.

[Ron Jones]

Titanium would hold up just fine. We expose it to continuous hot sea water for decades with no corrosion issues, but I have seen titanium shear at loads much lighter than high carbon steel. I think stainless is the way to go and their is nothing wrong with 316. Alan and his guys are fantastic and I pray that they come up with a solution but to be honest I'm OK with a 15 pound 5:1 and a 20+# 4:1 on these reels. If you need Jigmaster capacity and high retrieve rate and high drag then a 4:1 mini tank will fit you. If you need a 5:1 mini tank that fishes 80#s, well I don't know why you would have to have that, their are better reels out there, namely Mr. Sal's Opus.

5:1 high drag might be nice in a BFS but really if you are fishing that heavy the 4:1 cranking power is probably the better advantage.

Ron

[BMITCH]

Titanium would hold up just fine. We expose it to continuous hot sea water for decades with no corrosion issues, but I have seen titanium shear at loads much lighter than high carbon steel. I think stainless is the way to go and their is nothing wrong with 316. Alan and his guys are fantastic and I pray that they come up with a solution but to be honest I'm OK with a 15 pound 5:1 and a 20+# 4:1 on these reels. If you need Jigmaster capacity and high retrieve rate and high drag then a 4:1 mini tank will fit you. If you need a 5:1 mini tank that fishes 80#s, well I don't know why you would have to have that, their are better reels out there, namely Mr. Sal's Opus.

5:1 high drag might be nice in a BFS but really if you are fishing that heavy the 4:1 cranking power is probably the better advantage.



X2, Ron well said!
Ron

[Black Pearl]

Here is the latest updated on the pinion issue.

We have come up with a solution. We will keep the main gear in 316 SS, and we will use heat treated SS for the pinion gear. The heat treated pinion will be much harder than the 316 SS main gear.

We think that that will resolve the pinion gear problem. We should have a test result in 2 weeks, and Sal will also test it on top of out initial testing.

If everything works out the way we think, we will have a very strong pinion gear.

Stay tuned!!!!!


Thanks,
--Alan

[BMITCH]

Alan, sounds great! Thanks for all the hard work!