Reel Repair by Alan Tani

Living in Virginia Beach, we get a pretty good White Marlin bite in July/Aug/Sept. This is circle hook fishing at it's finest...trolling ballyhoos and dropping back to hungry lit up marlins.

Lots of folks use the Shimano Talica 20BFC's due to their crazy good free spool and their ability to have 3 pounds of drag at strike.

One of the biggest gripes I hear is that when the reel is in free spool, and you begin to ease the lever up to increase drag and set the circle hook....there is a hard "ramp/speed bump" to over come before the drag kicks in. A search online shows people have ground down this "speed bump" to provide for a smoother transition when engaging the drag.

I've routinely serviced Shimano Torsa 30's for a travelling tournament team and these reels did NOT have a "speed bump" while engaging the lever drag.

I finally got 8 of the BFC's in for service and decided to order up 2 Cams to play with.

Here is the "speed bump" on the cam. (just to the left of the blue pointer)

My Plan is to take small file and smooth that bump down on the sides (0 and 180) to see what it does.

Stay tuned.

really looking forward to this!!!!!

That's quite a lip. I too look forward to seeing how this plays out. I imagine a few passes with the file on each side would do it. But I also imagine it's important to have the same number of passes with the file on each side.

Isn't it there to make it harder to unintentionally freespool the reels?

Quote from: boon on March 16, 2026, 09:30:54 PMIsn't it there to make it harder to unintentionally freespool the reels?

First I've ever heard of that?   Could be true.

However...most of the anglers in my region have the reel already in freespool and are holding the rod in hand all day waiting to feel the bite.     

If philaroman was still posting he'd remind us that if it was a feature, Shimano would have a proprietary name for it.