MC Casting setup for SX-HX

Started by GClev, February 14, 2019, 12:43:12 AM

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GClev

"Hand it to the deckhand." - Cal Sheets

First the bad, then the good.
Here's one ugly truth about every Avet mini since it first wowed the crowd.  Full of line, mounted to a rod, there no good place to rub a thumb.  Every spool is buried up to the frame like a lot of other converted freshwater baitcasters pressed into saltwater use. The Avet smart thumb grip for cast control was left out of the design, no machined ribs or ridges nor any texture or flanges, nothing to take control of the spin or to advance the design.  Casting it without any bump to rub is a hot mess.  All hard casters agreed decades ago the reel is a real #### because it spins too fast. Tuners resorted to old school STP and lower the line level a full quarter inch.  Never a fire-and-forget with Avet, it bites fingers and wrecks line.  In a smart move, after a million burnt thumbs served and a flood of backlash, the corporation responded by mating old tech with a modern magnet array to tame the tales of unrecoverable overspins and reinvent Avet's version of thumb-less casting.

Staring at a computer screen long enough to recap eight to ten years of internet banter surrounding Avet+MC from a handful of fishing touchstones makes my eyes and butt hurt.  It's a 4-day read, quite a trudge, and filled with opinions typified by fishermen just like Calico Killer Kevin - Surf Yoda - 3656 posts -  who writes, "IMO I would skip the MC. Avets are cast-friendly IMO.  The MC may help initially with casting surface irons but I think you'll find that it is limiting after awhile."  

That quote may be typical of the faint praise for Magic Cast across the fisho-sphere, calling Avet cast-friendly and MC unwanted, but it's fake news.  Fake news.  First, Avet reels are cast-ugly.  A hard cast with infinite free spool and no thumb traction can wreck a spool of line in a microsecond, the kind of damage that can postpone or even spoil an entire one-rod fishing adventure.  The catch saving the day is the list of other terrific features fishermen demand and these cast-ugly reels do so well, too well to ignore them.  Second, never skip the Magic Cast.  Avet's smart magnet fills out their account.  Model to model and reel to reel, the engineering and execution are outstanding, and the magnet is the same.  

Calico Killer Kevin - Surf Yoda - added, "During the Fred Hall Show this year, I casted MXJ's with and without MC. I could wing the tennis ball easily 20yds more without the MC, even set at zero. And for $60 more? No thanks."

MC magnet stories must be true.  Google and a hundred Kevins says so.  One after the next, searches of many types return a long list of e-complaints about bad-bad MC juju, long ones, short ones, fat ones, skinny ones, and even a few loveless monologues describing vivid bloodless magnet circumcisions or even emasculations.  Ouch!  

The potent pair of half-round NdFeB magnets hanging under the Avet side plate work as advertised to limit the spool.  Most fishermen agree too that SX to HX, all the Avet MC reels produce great consistency cast after cast, stop after stop, page after page, and beer after beer. The $60 for a magnet job sure seems fair.  After a hundred hard casts on the home range, testing both sides of the hump, maybe the new parts wear in and reels smooth out.  Twelve perfect casts more and a long afternoon date with bait later, choosing less tangles, more distance, and no snapping noises is a no-brainer. A man could retire on that cast.  So what's the deal?  Why the hate?  Cutting off my magnet sounds painful.

True then and now, always read the manual.  There is, by my count, zero mention of Avet casting in their own catalog or other tech info.  Avet recommends a "full spool" and describes the drag preset knob as "set-and-forget."  Blah Blah Blah.  "Full spools" are for trolling, not casting.  "Set-and-forget" is long-range hubris, not casting.  

Returning to some of the crowd-sourced web hate for the Magic Cast magnet, there isn't a lot of love or a lot of luck fingering the knob.  Their magnet is pulling too hard.  Their knob is hard to find and turn with cold wet fingers. Their knob doesn't turn it off.  That's the buzz.  

Chatsworth CA is not the Minster Leas.  Safety casting on the boat or tarmac is not pasture or shore casting either.  Anyone who is prone to use AT's knowledge base and pry open the reel's internals finds that lever positions #1 & #2 are not equal. When the lever is in the "bait" position the spool is .010 - .015" to the right of the "free" position.  Who cares?  For the 12' castaholic, the "bait" position should be renamed "Cast #2".  The contemporary reality is the Avet manual and others* might have failed to mention that  the "bait" position and more can be used to cast.  Zen casters use it to "shift" into looser flight modes, higher on the drag ramp, to separate the spool from the magnet by another ten to fifteen points.  Cast #2 is the G-spot, a sweet spot on the cam for casting with less magnet.  A micrometer confirms it, but it could be my lyin' eyes doing the deceiving, since nothing exists if it isn't on the internet, right?

Grab a two-speed SX-HX in your hand and put your drag lever in the G-spot. Watch the spool move to the right and disengage from the un-altered full-strength magnet about the thickness of a condom, with zero surgery and sarcastically, not a lot of technical expertise. A long caster might get great satisfaction from casting with your lever in the G-spot before resorting to any surgical mutilation of the magnet or massaging the Bellville stack.

G-spot casting works well on the MC-cast two-speeds and the Raptors without internal mods or metalwork. The re-positioned external knobs still work.  The mag knob still rotates the magnetic flux at the new magnet-spool distance.  SX and MX reels shifted right .010-.012". The JX, LX, HX spools shifted right .013-.015".

There are about three different 2-speed MC reels in each size (a lot of reels) with different cam and arc detents.  Each reel has an easy-to-find G-spot for casting.  It is not the all-back-full #1 position.  The MXL Raptor has one easy G-spot.  The MXL MC 2-speed (no arc) has 2 G-spots, each with greater magnet-spool separation.

It appears that maybe this cool magnet distance feature might have gone unused, virtually unreported, and hence unloved by the many.  I'm just sayin' I love the G-spot.  It would be a mistake not to use it.  Pulling the drag lever back into Avet's advertised #1 slot re-engages my magnets ten-thousandths more.

*Casting mode was observed in the threads below, but the importance to casting might have been minimized or gone unrecognized.  Kudos to jlezama and forest101 and all the guys who almost found the G-spot and didn't know it.  Some folks will go through their entire lives and never find a G-spot.

https://alantani.com/index.php?topic=1846.msg9142;topicseen#msg9142
https://alantani.com/index.php?topic=7358.msg62582;topicseen#msg62582