Reel Repair by Alan Tani

Quote from: Pro Reel on March 03, 2018, 03:57:20 PM.......one thing I noticed in my shop years ago was a strange phenomenon of a reel that was smooth before service becoming rough after service. Some techs back then told me they thought the gears just needed to reseat themselves and would smooth up over time. That wasn't acceptable for me to do with customers reels. I either needed to figure a way to be sure the reels would be at least the same smoothness after service as before, if not better, or just quit doing spinning reels altogether...

been there and thought the same !! 

and hate it!

In terms of re-aligning gears for meshing, the gears are almost certainly "hunting" in any modern reel; that is to say the number of teeth on each gear is usually a prime number so there are no common factors, and your "5:1" reel is probably more like 13:67. This means that every tooth of the drive gear will eventually meet every tooth of the pinion gear, and the position the gears are in when the reel is reassembled means nothing.
The exception to this is gears that have to be "timed", such as the oscillation drivetrain in Shimano Baitrunner/Thunnus reels, because the oscillation gears aren't round and thus need to stay in relationship to one another.

Does using the reel under load rather than couch reeling ( ) wear the gears in faster.

My Stella 14k Has only one shim behind the main gear. Is it possible to actually have no shims at all.

It has been for service but I don't think it is particularly smooth. Is not to say is bad just doesn't have a wow! Smooth factor

Just about anything "under load" is going to wear faster.  The use of shims is for the purpose of getting the gear teeth to mesh properly, so it is possible, if tolerances are correct, to have no shims.  You can mark one of the gears teeth with dykem, a red or blue stain, and run the gears and see the pattern left on the gear to see how they mesh, then shim or remove shims accordingly.  Also, a colored chalk can be used to accomplish the same thing.

  Roughness can be caused by the gears being shimmed too closely together making the teeth of one gear "bottoming out" against the other gear, or you could have a bad bearing.  You could try removing the shim that is there and see if it smoothes out; if so, try a thinner shim.  The shim could also be there to keep the back of the gear from rubbing on some other part of the reel, more of a spacer rater than a shim.