Adding Increased Drag to a Reel

[nelz]

A properly designed lever drag that has the anti-reverse built in at the drag plate...

What reels have this design?

[Cuttyhunker]

The star drag weakness of going into gear with a load on the reel is "fixed" by having the reel set to a light drag when in free spool mode. Throwing the lever to a light drag reduces the shock load on the components, then use the star to screw down to business mode.  Instead of stopping the weight in 3 inches, it may take a few feet, and a few seconds spreading the strain over time, now you're within the limits of the machines metallurgy. To steal a signature here, "Any machine is a smoke machine if you use it wrong enough".  The old man was never a fan of the "hole shot", going from idle to wide open in one fell swoop, zero strain to max strain in an instant, he taught me easy up easy down on the throttle.  Same for the star reels.  Took lots of tuna with the stars set light, when they hook up you're not going to stop them on a dime.

[foakes]

Star Drag Penns are a relatively simple and straight-forward reel.  Tough, reliable, capable, fairly forgiving when used improperly...

However, many of these are used on boat, piers, and trolling lakes by folks (unlike the members on our site) who just don't know how the various functions are supposed to work and interact with each other.  They just want to catch a fish.

Nothing wrong with that.

But, those of us who have worked on party boat boat reels, and guest loaner reels — LB's, Senators, JM's, SM's, etc. — know how they are made and how they can be used effectively.

The seemingly simple (to us) refining of the drags for smoothness and capability, the shift lever (when to use it effectively without damage), the audible clicker, the proper adjustment of drag settings prior to strike, the adjustment of the drag when fighting a fish, how to not get a birdnest, how to cast or drop a line, how to thumb a spool, how to pump and crank the rod/reel partnership, evening the line lay, keeping pressure and no slack, and not tearing up the inside components — is not even something a lot of experienced anglers know well.

Squidders and Mariners are another variation — and a book could be written about each of these reels also.

The further we look into the details — why, how, and when the features of a reel were engineered — we will also understand just a little more about each reel.  And this "stacking" of our knowledge will keep increasing.

Best, Fred

[oldmanjoe]

The star drag weakness of going into gear with a load on the reel is "fixed" by having the reel set to a light drag when in free spool mode. Throwing the lever to a light drag reduces the shock load on the components, then use the star to screw down to business mode.  Instead of stopping the weight in 3 inches, it may take a few feet, and a few seconds spreading the strain over time, now you're within the limits of the machines metallurgy. To steal a signature here, "Any machine is a smoke machine if you use it wrong enough".  The old man was never a fan of the "hole shot", going from idle to wide open in one fell swoop, zero strain to max strain in an instant, he taught me easy up easy down on the throttle.  Same for the star reels.  Took lots of tuna with the stars set light, when they hook up you're not going to stop them on a dime.

I agree with you , drag is not a set and forget setting .      Another point about dropping in gear is that you are getting the drags to a working temperature / sneak preview that the drags  are ready for a run .........  
       
      I was ready to hit post and Fred`s post came up .        As a drag racer it`s not just the engine , clutch  , transmission  rear end , chassis set up,  ect ,  ect

[jurelometer]

A properly designed lever drag that has the anti-reverse built in at the drag plate...

What reels have this design?

Avets, the TLD 20/30 two speeds, some (all?) Penn Internationals are the ones that spring to mind. I am sure that there are plenty of others.  In the basic design, the drag plate,  ratchet, and pinion are connected, and the spool is moved toward the drag plate to exit freespool or apply more drag clamping force.  Reel designs that want a semi-sealed chamber around the drag have  a bit of an issue about what to do about the dog, which has to be anchored to the frame or side plate.  Penn goes through some gymnastics to have the drag plate on the spool shaft on splines, and the and dog system works off the same shaft on the other side of the reel.  Or something like that (International  experts feel free to correct me).  The TLD two speeds use the pinion for a ratchet, which might make a gear maker shudder a bit, but simplifies the design further.   The Avets use the backward rotation of the  main gear to mover a lever  that flips the dog  toward the drag plate pinion combo.  All of these variants take the load off the drive train whenever you are not actively winding.

From a  design perspective, there is more room to put the dog and ratchet on the main gear,  and less expense/risk  to copy these well established designs.  You give up the benefit of eliminating stress on the gears under load, and the multiplier effect on the dog, but you maintain the benefit of losing the multiplier effect on the drag.  And you can also stick an AR bearing on the main (handle) shaft, which is an inexpensive but very unfortunate popular feature.

-J

[Ron Jones]

J,
So you're saying that if a lever and a star have the same spool, gear ratio and handle; it will take less force to turn the handle of the lever under load because the anti reverse system system acts on the gear instead of the shaft mounted ratchet?

I'm not certain what you are trying to get across, but what I just described is not true.

The Man

[Dominick]

There is no bigger thrill in fishing than dropping the reel in gear when a large rooster fish is taking line.  I do it with all my fishing in Mexico, from tuna to dorado.  I like it and I know how to fix the reel if it goes down.  Dominick

[jurelometer]

Somehow I always end up being the contrarian in these debates 

The star drag weakness of going into gear with a load on the reel is "fixed" by having the reel set to a light drag when in free spool mode. Throwing the lever to a light drag reduces the shock load on the components, then use the star to screw down to business mode.  Instead of stopping the weight in 3 inches, it may take a few feet, and a few seconds spreading the strain over time, now you're within the limits of the machines metallurgy. To steal a signature here, "Any machine is a smoke machine if you use it wrong enough".  The old man was never a fan of the "hole shot", going from idle to wide open in one fell swoop, zero strain to max strain in an instant, he taught me easy up easy down on the throttle.  Same for the star reels.  Took lots of tuna with the stars set light, when they hook up you're not going to stop them on a dime.

I agree with you , drag is not a set and forget setting .      Another point about dropping in gear is that you are getting the drags to a working temperature / sneak preview that the drags  are ready for a run .........  
       
      I was ready to hit post and Fred`s post came up .        As a drag racer it`s not just the engine , clutch  , transmission  rear end , chassis set up,  ect ,  ect

I think of this debate the other way around.  There  is an advantage to a star drag compared to how lever drags are currently designed:  with a star drag, you can snap from freespool to full drag instantly with a spring loaded lever.  I prefer a star drag for vertical  jigging, because when I get a bump or sudden slack on the drop, I can  get into gear and winding faster than on a lever drag reel.  There are plenty of star drag reel systems that will hold up to this type of use well enough, but this can be the first part of the system to eventually fail for some types of fishing.  Seen plenty of examples in Penn star drags in Baja.

The methods that you all have been suggesting are workarounds to minimize a weakness inherent  in star drags.  Lever drags do not have this weakness.  The  workaround is not always completely effective.  If you have ever dropped a live bait over the rail only to have a tuna rocket through, you know that you have to give it a bit of a run before flipping the lever and setting the hook, and that full drag is probably not advisable at this moment anyways.  By now ,  the spool is spinning crazy fast and the pinion is not turning, a lighter drag helps, but it is still rough on that junction where the pinion is suddenly snapped into the spindle.


Another case is working jigs near the bottom.   Although  the break off might not happen immediately, whether you land that big yellowtail or snapper is often determined in the first second or two.   You can usually get a few winds or more  while the fish is still in attack mode and not run-away  mode.   I don't  want to spend that vital time tightening  the drag, or working with less than max drag. 

I will entirely agree that star drags can be plenty capable, especially  in the hands of someone who understands the weaknesses of the design and can work around them.  But a better design can be more capable, more durable, and needs less expertise to operate.

[snip...]
The further we look into the details — why, how, and when the features of a reel were engineered — we will also understand just a little more about each reel.  And this "stacking" of our knowledge will keep increasing.

"Why how and when" is a very astute observation.  A lot of what goes into a design for these type of products has less to do about meeting functional goals than  it does about meeting customer preferences, supplier costs, manufacturing limitations at the the time of the initial design, and so on.   

As someone who spent too much of my life designing and prototyping, I have a healthy respect for how hard it is to come up with a design of something even as simple as a fishing reel  that is simple, easy to operate, durable and high performance.  It takes time, training and talent and a bit of magic/inspiration from out of the ether. The best design can be  fundamentally different than what is expected, and then you have a marketing problem.

FWIW,  when analyzing someone else's design and running across something curious, I have found that there are plenty of occasions where there is a actually a valid reason that I had failed to consider.  But more often than not, it is a flaw. Since flaws are not usually intentional, the designer had a blind spot, miscalculation, or misunderstood how the product might be used now or in the future.   And it is easier to find flaws in someone else's work than your own.  I have found it to be counterproductive to give the designer too much benefit of the doubt, and to be too defensive when my own designs are scrutinized.  YMMV

-J

[jurelometer]

J,
So you're saying that if a lever and a star have the same spool, gear ratio and handle; it will take less force to turn the handle of the lever under load because the anti reverse system system acts on the gear instead of the shaft mounted ratchet?

I'm not certain what you are trying to get across, but what I just described is not true.

The Man

Hey Ron,

Sorry if I was not clear.  I think you might be  mixing up the freespool  lever, the handle arm functioning as a lever, and the gears acting as the rotational equivalent of a lever.  Probably my fault for trying to write too compactly.

The gear ratio provides leverage.  Anything on the wrong side of that leverage has to use additional force to counter the  rotational load.  So the parts of your system that are used to stop or slow rotational movement will be more effective when implemented before the leverage is applied.   On a reel, this will be on the pinion side.   This is possible to do with a lever drag,  and impossible to do with a star drag.  Simple as that. 

-J

[Ron Jones]

I spend about 1/3 of my time designing software and automated testing. Your statement about a marketing problem is perhaps your most valid to date.

The Man

[nelz]

If I understand this correctly, the higher the gear ratio, the tighter your have to turn the drag star to achive a given drag pressure?

This would, however, be compensated for by the higher ratio reel having a bigger diameter main gear, the bigger gear allowing for larger drag disks, thus achieving greater drag in return.

Of course the lower ratio reel will have a larger pinion in relation to the size of the main, resulting in a more robust gear set. It will also be easier to crank. Just my $.02 

[jurelometer]

If I understand this correctly, the higher the gear ratio, the tighter your have to turn the drag star to achive a given drag pressure?

Yes if you substitute the word "pressure" with "resistance".  Which I think is what you meant.

This would, however, be compensated for by the higher ratio reel having a bigger diameter main gear, the bigger gear allowing for larger drag disks, thus achieving greater drag in return.

I don't believe so.  This is a common misconception.  Sliding friction is not affected by surface area.  In layman's terms, the load is simply spread out over a larger area, so the amount of friction per square inch just decreases, but the total friction is unchanged.  Sliding Friction is a function of clamping force multiplied by the coefficient of friction (the slipperiness of the two surfaces).     

But one caveat on size:  once the drag starts slipping, how much braking work that can be done per revolution is a function of distance traveled per revolution, which is a function of the collective diameters from the inside to the outside of the disk.  Strangely enough, if you cut the center out of a disk, turning it into a ring, more braking work will be done per revolution, because the average distance traveled per revolution of the braking surfaces will now be longer.  That is why  the disc pads on a car  brakes are relatively small, and when they want more braking capability they increase the rotor diameter they don't make the pads bigger.

Putting these two concepts together. the pinion has more room for a larger diameter disk, which  will be braking 360 degrees of rotation per spool revolution , vs 72 degrees on the main gear side (ass7uming a 5:1 gear ratio), which makes it easier to accomplish a lot more braking work (motion to heat) per spool revolution with a lever drag than a star drag design.

Or something like that

Of course the lower ratio reel will have a larger pinion in relation to the size of the main, resulting in a more robust gear set. It will also be easier to crank. Just my $.02 

Sort of agree.  The robustness of the gear set will primarily be a function of how well the gears stay aligned. Deeper teeth can help, but are a poor substitute for maintaining  proper alignment.   Big won't save you if  once the tip of the tooth is engaged.  The curved tooth edge is a very specific shape, designed to roll across each other limiting changes in speed (and friction) as the load rolls across the tooth and shifts from one tooth to the next.  But this only works if things are kept reasonably well aligned.

Agree that if you keep the center distance between the gears unchanged, a lower gear ratio means a larger pinion. And a larger pinion might give you room to make the teeth on both gears larger if you originally had did not have enough pinion diameter to make the  teeth the size that you wanted.   But this would be an unusual design process.  The gear design process that I am familiar with is that you decide the tooth size, count, and gear ratio needed for the desired load capacity and ratio, and calculate the center distance based on those numbers. It doesn't take much of a change in center distance to accommodate a big jump in tooth depth.

Penn kind of cheated on the 500 to 505 design, where  they tried  to squeeze a higher gear ratio into an existing round reel.  The proper solution would be to make the main gear larger and move it farther from the same pinion, but this would have required more new parts and more redesign.  Otherwise, very limited room to move the centers farther apart. They also changed the pitch circle ratio by making the pinion diameter smaller (and the main gear larger) but no longer had enough meat on the pinion to cut full sized teeth.  These smaller teeth would have been strong enough if the gear sleeve/post design was not so flexy.   

Anyways, Penn pretty much got away with the 505 design kludge until knuckleheads like me started loaded it up with 40 lb mono and cranking down the drag to cast irons at yellowtail.    So I am not sure that I would categorize this as design flaw vs. a calculated risk.

-J

[nelz]

Are you telling me a big drag disk will not produce more resistance than a tiny one? Under equal pressure that is.

[Ron Jones]

Are you telling me a big drag disk will not produce more resistance than a tiny one? Under equal pressure that is.

There is a thread on here from years ago that lasted lots and lots of pages where we tried to figure this out. I posted links to engineering texts and peer reviewed journals and there was still resistance. J is absolutely correct. If we were talking about linear resistance size doesn't matter, but when it turns into a disk everything changes, and stays the same at the same time.

[nelz]

and I thought quantum entanglement sounded bogus...