Titanium reels

[biggiesmalls]

Wanted to see what people think about this concept... titanium reels.

In theory - the idea would be to choose a reel you like the design of, it could be any reel in the world. You'd then go to a machinist or someone of the sort, provide them with titanium, and the reel of your choice, completely disassembled. You'd then have all the parts replicated, out of titanium instead of whatever material they're made from originally.

For example - let's take a 980 Mag Power, because I know they're John's favorite and I've got one sitting right here. This reel is made from plastic, stainless steel, and aluminum. For my estimate, I will say about 20% of the reel's volume is plastic, about 40% is aluminum, and about 40% is stainless steel.
Now, without line this reel weighs about 21 ounces, or 595 grams. What we want to find is the density of the reel. With the proportions of the reel's makeup listed above, we can calculate out the average density of the reel.
From the calculation, our reel has a density of about 4.5 grams per cubic centimeter.
Since we have density and mass, we can find that the volume of our reel is right around 130 cubic centimeters. (Note: there would be a bit of overestimate here, because of some empty space in the reel. This would be more accurate if we calculated an official volume for each individual part, but for this we will say that the reel has a volume of 120 cubic centimeters).

Now, we know our reel's volume, so we can determine how much raw titanium we would need if we were to rebuild every individual part with it.
The density of titanium is, conveniently, about 4.5 grams per cubic centimeter - the same we calculated our reel to be.
So simply working backwards, we would see that we'd need about 540 grams of titanium in order to rebuild our reel from it entirely.

Except, this is not the case. Since titanium is much stronger than aluminum, stainless steel, or plastic, we can use less of it.
Titanium is almost twice as strong as stainless steel, three times as strong as aluminum, and over 75 times as strong as fiberglass-reinforced plastic.
If we average out the strengths, we would find that the solid titanium would be about three times as strong as our mix of aluminum, steel, and plastic. So, we can actually use a third of the mass of titanium that we used earlier - and we will get the same strength as before. Of course, this would be a high-performance reel, so to be safe we will use about 40-45% of the material above - this will give us far more strength than our original 980.

So, in our reel, we're now going to be using about 240 grams of titanium, which works out to just under 8 and a half ounces.

We will now have a reel the same size as the 980 Mag Power, built to be 8.5 ounces. This is incedibly light - for example, the most popular bass casting reels are probably around 7-8 ounces. These are reels used constantly, all day long, by professional bass anglers, without any fatigue. But they have lots of plastic in them, and about 20% of the capacity of our 980.
However, it will be stronger than the original 980. And since we're using less material, we will have shaved some volume off of the spool - meaning we have increased capacity while keeping the same physical size of the reel. It wouldn't make a huge difference with mono, but if we're backing with spectra we could probably get a few dozen extra yards on there.

Now, there are plenty of people who don't mind casting reels over a pound all day - so this might not be too appealing to them. However, titanium has one last property that makes it ideal for this application. In short, it doesn't corrode. You could leave this reel soaked in saltwater, and it would be months, if not years, before any ill effects.

There are two main downsides to titanium that come to mind. First is obvious - cost. Titanium costs over $6.50 per gram, meaning just in raw titanium we would spend almost $1,600. That doesn't take into account the cost of machining/casting the reel parts, which could double the cost of this reel. We will say that the final product would cost $3,000... yikes.
Another downside is that it scratches fairly easily - the preventative measure to this would be to put on a protective coating, which would likely be desired anyways, unless you're into pure silver reels.

This certainly wouldn't be a project for every angler. $3K is a lot of money to cough up, especially for such a small reel. You could probably deck out 4 or 5 jigmasters for that kind of money.
But if you're an angler that wants the absolute best - the lightest, strongest reel out there, with the best capacity/size ratio of any reel, a reel that will never corrode, this would be it. These would be an investment - you'd be able to fish with them the rest of your life, without replacement. You could pass them along to children, maybe even grandchildren, and they'd work like day one.

This was just a random idea I thought up one day, and finally decided to play with some numbers on it. It wouldn't be cheap, but for someone that wants the performance of a Ferrari with the weight of a Mitsubishi and the power of a F250, I can't think of a way to beat it.
Thoughts?
Drew

[biggiesmalls]

Oh, and another thought.

If someone wanted to redo a reel like the 980 Mag Power - surely it would be possible to have a one-piece design done, reducing the number of screws needed, making for an even stronger build, potentially reducing the amount of materials needed.
Just a thought.

Drew

[boon]

My first thought is that based on the numbers you've provided, people are sinking $500-600 into Jigmasters........ to me, this is like spending $100k on a Toyota Corolla and ending up with a car that is much much worse than a $100k car. Each to their own though.

You raise some interesting questions though. One of which is what about modern super-composites - namely carbon fibre. Anyone thought about building a carbon fibre frame or spool? Even if you had to use inserts for the precision parts, you could no doubt save a whole lot of weight, and I'm fairly certain it's a whole lot cheaper than titanium. I have some carbon fibre handle arms and you can barely tell you're holding them, they weigh that little.

The "problem" I foresee with doing this is that technology moves on. They would end up as beautiful shelf reels, but an immaculately maintained original spec reel does just as good a job of that. Some reels that people loved a lot not all that long ago (Penn 9/0 is a great example of this, and a nearly endless list of spinners) are completely and utterly superseded by modern reels, to the extent that I just wouldn't go fishing with one of them any more.

[oc1]

There's plenty of carbon fiber frames and spools out there now, but in fishing equipment they call it graphite (a misnomer) instead of carbon fiber.  

Carbon nanotubes are about five times stronger than carbon fiber but it is currently about a hundred times more expensive.  Carbyne is about twice as strong as carbon nanotubes.  Graphine is stronger still but it's not there yet.

Cellulose nanocrystals made from wood chips or sawdust costs ten times less than carbon fiber and is about twice as strong as carbon fiber.  However, they're still developing the ways to prevent if from absorbing water if not coated.  Funny, because the old Penn bakelite side plates are reinforced with plain wood flour.  They too suffer from water absorption problems which is why the rings crack and are so hard to get back on the side plate.

The other thing is you have to define "strong" before you can really compare any of these things.  There are many aspects to being "strong" and the material has to be suited to the application.  Carbon nanotubes are stronger than titanium in some respects, but weaker than titanium in other respects.  That's a whole other subject.

I bet the labor cost to make a one-off titanium reel from scratch would be a lot more than $1600.
-steve