RE: Topic: trinidad/torium dog spring upgrade

[Bucktail]

Hi Alan,

Hope you are well. Just a quick update on clicking Toriums. I placed the the drag clickspring behind the anti-reverse pawl on my toriums in a similar fashion to your plan of fitting the Trini DC pawl. Well after a couple of months it seems like the anti-reverse gear is eating away at the pawl. It is not the usual damage that occurs when the anti-reverse bearing fails, you can see the gear slowly rubbing a groove in the pawl. Obviously the standard Torium/Trini pawl is not hard enough to handle the constant friction of the anti-reverse gear. You sometimes wonder what they were thinking when designing this system. On the older reels it was such a simple, robust system that hardly ever gave trouble. Just the whole design on it is so bad, the pawl and gear design are just bad, it never engages snugly, spring or no spring.

Hopefully they have sorted this on the new Trini A. I see the drags are now "Dartanium II" aka woven carbonfibre. Not that I will purchase one in the near future, they are a bit pricey.

Regards,
Leon

So with this new information the question becomes, is it still worth it to perform this upgrade?

[alantani]

i still think so.  perhaps the stainless steel used to make the ambassaduer style pawl is softer than the steel used to make the trinidad dc pawl.  i'm wondering if leon used the ambassaduer-style pawl and just added a spring to that.......   

[CapeFish]

that was going to be my comment, I used the standard pawl, the dc one should work better because it is springloaded from the start thus has to be able to withstand the constant wear. The standard Torium/Trini pawl certainly can't handle it. Yesterday I heard of a Trini 40 going knucke bust, both pawls failed, it had standard washers

[alantani]

the failure of the trinidad 40 should be documented.  if you can get photos, that would be very helpful.  alan

[CapeFish]

Not sure if photos will be possible, will find out. a lot of people here use Trni 40 reels for surfcasting, you can fit 900m of line on it if you use 600m braid and then fill it with 300m 0.55m mono and still put in a long cast so great reel if you are after a very big shark. The guy had a massive bronze whaler shark on. After a while the drag started snatching (standard dartanium), anti reverse bearing went, handle kicked back and he then felt the 1st dog kick in, backed off the drag. got some line back in, fish ran again, drag snatches again, pawl kicks in for a bit and then fails, lost the fish in the end. There are plenty stories of torium 30s failing. people don't service the reels often, wade a lot with them, they gunk up and then the whole system fails. Or people put too much grease in the reels and the pawls become slow from all the grease and when you crank up the pressure there is no backup. The pawls on toriums get damaged even with carbontex washers, all mine show some form of damage, straight sticking a big shark in the shore break seems to damage the anti reverse system

[Bucktail]

Thanks guys.  I just ordered the pawl and spring today.