Okuma Custom Blue 5Nii

Started by rogan, August 17, 2022, 10:56:33 PM

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Ron Jones

I believe what you described in the beginning is exactly what I am describing and what the Panga captains did. It is a pain (on some reels) to push the button to exceed whatever position that reels stop is at while trying to catch a fish, but you absolutely can do it.

I am familiar with the idea of 180 degrees, I prefer a little more fidelity. In my experience inadequate drag is more desirable than excessive drag... Ford or Chevy.

The Man
Ronald Jones
To those who have gone to sea and returned and to those who have gone to sea and will never return
"

boon

If the screws are mostly reliant on the chemical bond rather than mechanical tightness then it shouldn't be too hard to "chase" the screw out with a very small punch or by being a bit brutal on a small flat-headed screwdriver, at least sufficiently to get a grip on the threads with something else.

jurelometer

#32
Quote from: boon on September 07, 2022, 03:59:21 AMIf the screws are mostly reliant on the chemical bond rather than mechanical tightness then it shouldn't be too hard to "chase" the screw out with a very small punch or by being a bit brutal on a small flat-headed screwdriver, at least sufficiently to get a grip on the threads with something else.

Loctite provides a mechanical bond -  at room temp after initial curing, the red stuff is hard and jams up the threads. At 500F it goes back to a liquid, and then back to solid as it cools.  Probably will respond to a solvent for cleaning purposes once you get it apart, but no idea which solvent is used.  Henkel has good documentation as long as you don't use the USA site :(, so there is probably some info on cleaning threads.

-J

rogan

#33
Reel tinkering had to be put on hold for a few days while I went back to work (yuck), but now I have had a chance to do some more work with the 5Nii.

Alan, thank you for the bellevilles, I received them in the mail on Friday. So armed with new parts, I tore down the reel and tried some differing combinations. { denotes original heavy bellevilles while ( denotes new lighter version

Configuration  Low  Strike   Full
{}{}                    4     14      20
(()()                   3     10      12
(){}                    6     11      17
{)){)                   6     12      17
(()(}                   4     11.5    15


I tried some mixed up combos just to make sure I understood the math involved. J, thank you for the link to the Belleville site, it was most helpful to understand how they apply force, and the series/parallel analogy to electronic circuits was most helpful. So the end result was, the stacking order of the bellevilles made no real difference. Force is force, so changing the order of the force in this application does not matter.  When I used two heavy and two light bellevilles, I got consistent results as long as the cups remained oriented the same way. If I had two heavy bellevilles in the stack, the max drag I could get was 17lb at full. That's the max force that two heavys can apply to the spool, changing the preset knob did not affect the max drag and did not offer much increase in useable drag range. Using two light bellevilles in the stack, when combined with a heavy, resulted in a low drag setting at 6 pounds or higher. I could not get a drag setting less than 6 pounds if I mixed the two types. Using all light bellevilles resulted in a max drag at full of 12 pounds.

So the end result for me was: the original 4 stack of heavy bellevilles gave me the most useable drag, the best range and the most adjustability. If I dialed the preset down 6 clicks, I could get 2lb min drag, 8lb at strike and 15 at full. And inbetween these preset dial adjustments, I could predict exactly what the drag was going to be since the cam is ground linear, that range of drag (13 pounds from 2 to 15) stays pretty consistent as you make adjustments to the preset dial. Six clicks up and I am at 4/14/20, a very predicable and useful range of drag.  So I guess Shakespeare was right, "Much Ado About Nothing".

But wait, there is more...

Something else happened along the way. When I finished my testing and decided to return to the original configuration, I tested the drag settings to make sure I had dialed in the correct preset. Moved the lever to strike and got 13.5 lbs, good, so I moved the lever to full, there was a loud pop and the spool went into freespool while the lever was at full.  Oh NO! I knew exactly what had happened. Since this reel is a pull system, as you increase the lever, you are pulling the spool to the handle side sideplate. Which means you are pulling the spool shaft and compressing the bellevilles which are on the clicker side of the spool. So what do the bellevilles come into contact with? Yup, that's right, they press against the c-clip on the spool shaft. If the c-clip breaks or slips out of the spool shaft groove, the bellevilles have nothing to press against, so you have no drag.

Well, this is my fault and the place where anyone in the future needs to pay attention. You cannot exceed the stack height of the bellevilles between the bearing and the groove in the spool shaft. If you try to compress the bellevilles to get the c-clip to fit, you will damage two things, the c-clip itself, and the groove in the spool shaft. The c-clip must fit into place without force. So I damaged both the c-clip and the spool shaft when trying out the different belleville combinations since any of the combos with more than 4 bellevilles was too tall and I had to apply force to get the c-clip to fit. I have ordered new parts for both. The added benefit to this tinkering is I now fully understand the reel, it's design, and how I was asking too much of the reel. I would like to get 13 to 14 pounds of drag at strike, just to make it easy on me when moving the lever during a fight so I don't have to worry about the strike stop detent. But I really shouldn't be using that much drag on a reel this small. Yeah, it's well built and performs very well and can go to some high drag numbers, but it's not built to live there. Now that I understand that the c-clip is what is holding all that drag in place, it makes my perspective of how to use the reel much more realistic. When I get it fixed, it will be 12lb at strike and 17 at full. If I can't handle the fish at those settings, I used the wrong tool for the job. Maybe I shouldn't be using this reel for yellowtail and expecting to lever up 20lb of drag to stop a 25lb (or larger) fish. I am very glad I broke it when testing and not on a fish!!!



Ron Jones

After reading this, I like those silly detents even less, and like star drags even more. It sucks that you broke the reel, but it seems like you learned a lot.

Would you refer to not have the detent at all, and then you could have your full drag range unencumbered? I don't believe it would be difficult to remove, but I'm not sure if the lever would hang up in the hole.

The Man
Ronald Jones
To those who have gone to sea and returned and to those who have gone to sea and will never return
"

rogan

Ron,  I actually like the detents as I find it easier to move the lever by a single click when adjusting the drag.  What surprises me is the amount of drag increase that sometimes accompanies a single click. When moving from free spool to drag settings, I may have 6 to 10 clicks where the reel remains in free spool, then in one extra click I get 2lb of drag and one more click gives me 6lbs of drag, and then each of the next clicks adds 1/2 pound evenly. It's an interesting engineering/math problem for sure. I still like the reel and will continue to fish it, especially since I now have first hand experience on to use it to it's best potential.

As far as breaking it, the replacement parts were $27 shipped, a small price to pay for the excellent knowledge I gained. Well, except for the broken reel seat screw, I'm still annoyed about that >:(  . And I don't have a fix for that yet.

Ron Jones

I can commiserate with broken reel seat screws. My Okuma Catalina went flying across Alan's garage when the real seat bolts sheared in the line winder.

The Man
Ronald Jones
To those who have gone to sea and returned and to those who have gone to sea and will never return
"

jurelometer

Great stuff!   Thanks so much for posting your experiences Rogan.  I have been learning a bunch.

Some things that I hadn't considered or just figured out:

1. In order for the cam to complete its travel from start to sunset, the available deflection range in the belleville stack has to be greater or equal to the cam rise.  This limits how far you can adjust the preset.  It also limits what you can do with the belleville stack. 

2.  Individual bellevilles a have a limited deflection range. And the ratio of deflection to load is not linear.  The more a belleville is compressed, the more load it takes to compress it farther.  I would guess that the deflection to load curve is straighter starting out, and if so -stacking more bellevilles in a series will give you a more evenly progressive ramp, but the stack still has to have the right load range for the  deflection range that matches the cam rise.   So  even if there is room for lots of bellevilles, this is tricky  stuff.

3.  It should be theoretically possible to design a cam shape that compensates for the belleville progressive load increase.  But that would require designing the cam for a specific belleville setup.

4.  This collectively makes a pretty good argument for cam grinding (Alan's approach).  Getting there tweaking bellevilles is going to be somewhere between hard and impossible.  As long as there is some deflection still available at sunset, you will get the cam progression that you want if leave the bellevilles unmolested and grind in the right cam shape. 

5.  Not a fan of a design that user a c-clip to secure that big of a load. 

6. I  am a fan of NOT worrying how linearly progressive the cam ramp is.  So I get a bunch of different possible sunset settings without having to take my reel apart. If the strike stop was adjustable, this would be about all I needed from a lever drag.

-J

sabaman1

#38
Looking at the specs and size of the reel it looks to be designed to fish no more than 25lb test mono. Which would give you a setting of maybe 8lbs at strike and 12lbs at full. I think if you want to fish those drag numbers your speaking of, the cavalla 12ll is the reel for you.
JIM

jurelometer

#39
Quote from: sabaman1 on September 13, 2022, 07:22:59 AMLooking at the specs and size of the reel it looks to be designed to fish no more than 25lb test mono. Which would give you a setting of maybe 8lbs at strike and 12lbs at full. I think if you want to fish those drag numbers your speaking of, the cavalla 12ll is the reel for you.
The Okuma USA site lists capacity  for 40 and 50lb braid, and max drag strike/sunset at 15/24 lbs.

https://okumafishingusa.com/products/cavalla-lever-drag-reels.

The international Okuma site lists same max drag in kilos  but doesn't specify braid test, just capacity by line diameter.

Not commenting on what the max practical settings for this reel might be, just what the published specs are.

-J

rogan

#40
J, thanks for the comments. I wasn't sure my ramblings were making a lot of sense. I appreciate your summary of the belleville operations, especially in light of how they relate to the cam.

As far as using a c-clip as a stop for the bellevilles to press against, my initial thought was similiar to your own thought, I don't like it. When I ordered the new replacement parts, i came to a realization that changed my thinking. The c-clip acts a built-in, but known, failure point. If the drag pressure gets too severe, the c-clip will pop and the reel goes into freespool. Which means if it fails first, which it should, the gears won't shred, handles won't bend and the frame won't flex out of alignment. And the repair is easy and cheap, $27 for a new spindle/spool shaft assembly which includes a new c-clip. I think I actually like the "safety valve" aspect of this system. I was able to fish the reel at 15 to 18 pounds of drag without failure, I caused the damage to the clip and spool shaft by forcing on the too tall belleville stack, so thats why it failed on me during testing. Without that damage, I think 15 to 18 pounds is totally acceptable for this reel.

rogan

Sabaman1, I would like to clarify my use of this reel. I bought it, spooled it up, put Alan's 3/0 hamdle on it, took it to the local park lake and casted it with lures from 1/2 oz to 2.25 oz on a 30 lb rod and decided I really liked it and planned to use it for future trips as a 30lb setup. Well, the night before the cedros trip, I tightened all the screws on my reels as my final preparation before leaving, since the previous year I had two reels with loose screws in the middle of the second day of fishing. When I checked the screws on my backup custom built 501, one of the bridge screws was stripped out. Don't know when or how it happened, but I couldn't fix it overnight. So I had to substitute a new reel, and the 5N was ready to go, so I took it.

It was not the right choice.

To quote MarkT "yellowtail are mean." And he is absolutely right.

But I didn't know that. This trip was my second yellowtail trip and it was very different from the first trip. To put it simply, the yellowtail were nice to me the first year. They were mean to me this year. Last year I caught limits each of the 4 days we went out and I did not lose a single fish, or lure or hook. This year I got broke off on rocks, kelp, etc and lost fish, lures and hooks, at least 6 times cause it happened so often I lost count. What was the difference? I don't know... it's fishing.

But I made different gear choices this year, bringing two lever drags and two star drags. Last year was all star drags. When I got bit this year, 11 or 12 pounds of drag wasn't remotely enough drag. These fish screamed off drag at those settings and by the time I got another 3 or 4 pounds of added drag, it was too late. The fish had pulled off another 15+ yards of line, added to the 20 or so yards of line I already had out, and they were in the structure, kelp or rocks and I was getting broken off. Since we fish in water from 60 to 100 feet deep, 30+ yards of line had them easily in a place where I couldn't get them.

So I had unintentionally brought the wrong reel to the fight. The 5N will be an excellent reel for open water and can easily handle 18lb of drag. But in Cedros, I needed 15 to 18 lbs of drag immediately to stop the fish from gaining any extra line and makimg it to structure. So this was a case of wrong tool for the wrong job.  I totally agree with you that a 12 sized reel would have been better, cause my Andros 12nii was my other lever drag reel. Even with 20 yards of 60lb mono leader and my stike set to 16lbs, I still got broken off twice. It was a hell of a lesson to learn!

pjstevko

Quote from: rogan on September 13, 2022, 06:30:23 PMSabaman1, I would like to clarify my use of this reel. I bought it, spooled it up, put Alan's 3/0 hamdle on it, took it to the local park lake and casted it with lures from 1/2 oz to 2.25 oz on a 30 lb rod and decided I really liked it and planned to use it for future trips as a 30lb setup. Well, the night before the cedros trip, I tightened all the screws on my reels as my final preparation before leaving, since the previous year I had two reels with loose screws in the middle of the second day of fishing. When I checked the screws on my backup custom built 501, one of the bridge screws was stripped out. Don't know when or how it happened, but I couldn't fix it overnight. So I had to substitute a new reel, and the 5N was ready to go, so I took it.

It was not the right choice.

To quote MarkT "yellowtail are mean." And he is absolutely right.

But I didn't know that. This trip was my second yellowtail trip and it was very different from the first trip. To put it simply, the yellowtail were nice to me the first year. They were mean to me this year. Last year I caught limits each of the 4 days we went out and I did not lose a single fish, or lure or hook. This year I got broke off on rocks, kelp, etc and lost fish, lures and hooks, at least 6 times cause it happened so often I lost count. What was the difference? I don't know... it's fishing.

But I made different gear choices this year, bringing two lever drags and two star drags. Last year was all star drags. When I got bit this year, 11 or 12 pounds of drag wasn't remotely enough drag. These fish screamed off drag at those settings and by the time I got another 3 or 4 pounds of added drag, it was too late. The fish had pulled off another 15+ yards of line, added to the 20 or so yards of line I already had out, and they were in the structure, kelp or rocks and I was getting broken off. Since we fish in water from 60 to 100 feet deep, 30+ yards of line had them easily in a place where I couldn't get them.

So I had unintentionally brought the wrong reel to the fight. The 5N will be an excellent reel for open water and can easily handle 18lb of drag. But in Cedros, I needed 15 to 18 lbs of drag immediately to stop the fish from gaining any extra line and makimg it to structure. So this was a case of wrong tool for the wrong job.  I totally agree with you that a 12 sized reel would have been better, cause my Andros 12nii was my other lever drag reel. Even with 20 yards of 60lb mono leader and my stike set to 16lbs, I still got broken off twice. It was a hell of a lesson to learn!

Now there's a guy who is learning and using that new knowledge to set himself up for success!!!!

Now get your #### down to SD and go on a tuna trip!!!!

jurelometer

Try it on a fly rod some time :) Kinda stoopid actually, but fun.

The way I see it, there is no reason not to start with maximum resistance with yellowtail, especially around structure.  You are not using the drag to wear them out on a run like a tuna,  you are using it to stop them from taking line and reaching the rocks. And you will need even more drag if they get up a head of steam.  As strong as they are, they sort of give up a bit if they can't reach structure, at which point, backing off a bit can be an option.

I also try to get into low gear early on a big fish. It is harder for them to reach the rocks if their nose is pointed up and they have to turn around. All fish have very little power pulling in any direction other than head first.  I don't think we take advantage of this as much as we should in all phases of the fight.

-J

oldmanjoe

  I don`t have a dog in this fight .    But if i was to experimenter with a drag profile , i would look at spring washers , wave washers and belleville washers and the combinations of both spring and belleville  washers .     Wave washer would help the low end and the belleville would the high end ..

https://www.spirol.com/assets/files/disc_wp_differences_between_disc_springs_and_belleville_washers_us.pdf

https://www.design-engineering.com/the-difference-between-disc-springs-and-belleville-washers-1004037495/
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