Anything but big cats!

Once again we're in between offshore trips, last minute cancellations and a sudden development of an itch pushes us find avenues to cure that itch. On such short notice, we regularly hit the pay ponds and this particular pond was rather famous for it's variety of fresh water species and large inhabitants. We've grown accustomed to regularly landing decent cats and sometimes it is just too predictable and repetitive.

What we did this time was to set upon ourselves to target everything but the big cats and put our ultralight gear to the test with a variety of tactics specifically to land new catches. Catches weren't epic but we did manage to surprise ourselves with a nice variety to show off.

Boy vs Fish. Sultan on Evergreen's PropMagic75, gently reeled in to not mess up its fragile mouth using Daiwa Emeraldas & Majorcraft's Go-emotion light spinning rod.

We were literally sweeping systematically across as many water column as we can cover and many more surprises ensues to keep our hopes up for catches anything but big cats.

A surprise take, nicely loaded Temujin 'The Spider'.

A common carp, a rare fatty common carp, a rare catch in this pond!

IMA's Spingulf seems to be racking up species after species here, amazing!

We did as best as we can to target anything but big cats, little did we know that we managed to find ourselves a loop hole interpretation of anything but big cats. These weren't big cats. Cats but not big cats. Passable by our standards.

While the heavy geared boys were hauling up pesky big red tails, This Bassday Nin Sui jigged about the bottom landed this little fella.

Nin Sui in the gob, nothing fancy, just bottom jigging, short to medium intervals.

Another small and skinny cat on the Nin Sui.

When we were about to wrap up our session for the day, I managed to get a hit from something big. I guess there's no escape here in hauling big cats and we have nothing to complain about since we've caught a variety of smaller specimens earlier. I take this as a nice send off from the pond to put a zonker at the end of this ultralight setup of Temujin the 'Spider' paired with a Shimano Stella 1000FE spooled with 6lbs line.

Boy wonders what's he doing fighting with that tiny stick.

Wonder no more, one of the redtail bullies attempting to out run my tackle. Ultralight, but packs a mighty fight!

IMA's Spingulf is the way to go here for all sizes of fish here.

I'd say we did pretty good for ourselves and met most of our expectations to catch 'anything but big cats' with a few creative interpretations of our own mandate. Once again, the ultralight setup of Temujin the 'Spider' + Shimano Stella 1000FE does pack a mighty fight.

Maxed BB Daiwas

My fishing buddy decided to get his Daiwa reels some pimpin hot ball bearings from hedgehog studio and the package arrived surprisingly quick from Japan. Hedgehog studio produces some fine ball bearings and some custom parts to jam more bearings into most Japanese reels.

Hedgehog studio offers 2 types of bearings for the 'Max BB' series. These are the salt water series  and they also offer fresh water 'high precision' versions without any special coating of specific material used. It comes with Japanese instructions but with sufficient graphics to guide you through most of the installation without much problems.

These 2 Daiwas were rather easy to dismantle and most of the upgrades don't require you to open up the body. They are either for the spool support, line roller or just knob handle bearings for smoother and longer lasting reel.

The Daiwa Emeraldas looked fine as per the previous pimping condition with minimal grease packing needed. A straight forward swap and some marine grease rubbed all over the line roller bits.

Daiwa Emeraldas Max BB replaces 3 bushings with high precision bearings. 1 for the line roller & 2 for the spool support.

The Daiwa Certate was also quite a straight forward pimpin so long as you don't mess with the mag-seal bits as the magnetic oil seal is 'proprietary' and can't be sourced easily. Max BB upgrades both spool support bushing to bearings, 1 line roller bearings to 2 line roller bearings with bearing housing plastics and rubber seals. 2 handle knob bearings are also included in the pack but this Daiwa Certate came with a pimped up ZPI foam handle knob.

Max BB 'Certate' consists of 5 bearings and some custom plastic/rubber parts. Line roller bushing replaced with an identical bearing+housing+seal set. You get 2 ball bearings for a smoother line roller.

This Daiwa Certate wasn't a virgin as it came with ZPI's foam knob handle. Spool support bushings show typical signs of wear, no surprises, new ball bearings ready to serve. Spool clicker base was packed with filthy grease, not good for new bearings.

Thoroughly degreased and cleaned spool support parts. Teflon shims stack of 2 to fine tune line lay on the spool. Greased up and loaded back into the main shaft ready for battle soon.

Only thing left would be to have these 2 reels get some tight lines action!

Busted bushing, melted bits, stuck line rollers on a buddy's Emeraldas2506 INF

I've been fishing with a buddy of mine over the past 6 months and we've been hauling quite a bit of regular sized cats and barras in our local paid ponds. He was using his first love, the super smooth Daiwa Emeraldas 2506 INF while I was on Shimano spinners all throughout.

Then comes our not so recent trip to Boon Mar Thailand where we were welcomed by decently sized barras (avg 7kgs and up) that takes on any lures thrown to them with all their might and spirited acrobatic jumps. It was a thoroughly enjoyable experience no doubt, but then comes the aftermath, he discovered that the Emeraldas feels weird with excessive play and clicking sensation while cranking the handles without line load, spool and rotor wobbles too. Not the regular breaking in looseness you usually expect but worrying wobbles and excessive free play.

He hands me the reel for a check up. I happily complied of course and quickly got to work.

Drag pressure disc & spool hub

First to be taken apart, damage count #1, the drag pressure disc, signs of excessive force binding damages can be seen around the edges of the rectangular hole. Damages can be seen on the spool hub shaft. Not a reel breaker but a good lesson learned to not use a squid reel to reel in cats or fighter barras.

Spool housing, line lay tuning shim, alien bits & spool hub retainer ring wire

Then comes the shocker. The spool was stuck on the floating shaft, odd that it should just slide out with just a few gentle wiggle.  I had no choice but the yank out the spool forcefully and as a result, the retainer ring wire was bent (pictured far right). No biggie as it was easily bent back into shape.

There was this unknown fibrous molten bits stuck at the base of the spool between the shims, I suspect this could be the line lay tuning shims as it was later discovered that the line lay shape became tapered towards the front. It was so badly damaged that it bonded onto the alloy base of the spool and worse of all, jammed up in between the alloy bushing, spool hub shaft and the spool housing. This is bad. More molten fiber was yanked out around the bushing and after several attempts trying to knock the bushing out, inaccessible by bearing pullers, it finally dislodges with some free play and dropped out.

Friction wear on spool housing and badly damaged bushing

Damage count #2. Spool housing base shows signs of forced friction wear with burrs sticking out of it's edges and the bushing's worn out creating friction instead. The bushing's worn so bad that it cannot even fit into the spool hub shaft anymore.

The base of the spool housing needed some serious fix with a dremel tool grinding off the burrs and polished off the unknown fiber bonded bits around. Damages in housing where the bushing sits was minimal therefore still not a reel breaker.

Bushing out, Hybrid Ceramics in. Pimped!

The bushing was beyond repair and couldn't even slot into the spool hub shaft. Out goes the bushing, in goes a new ceramic hybrid ball bearing which will outlast any steel based bearings out there with excellent corrosion resistant properties.

With the new ceramic hybrid ball bearing in, a quick test reveals that the spool wobble was now almost gone with a slight wiggle due to some wear on the spool housing itself.

Rotor & floating shaft's fine.

Next up, the rotor, looks good, nothing out of the ordinary. The floating shaft too. No signs of wear, which I believe is due to it being made out of high tensile steel, tough stuff.

Dry main gear, needs some TLC grease coating.

The main gear and internal bits are a tad dry and without grease protection, a few brush stroke of teflon grease is all it needs. Few cranks on the handle to know that there's too much sliding free play for the main gear between the bearings. Easily tuned and fixed with some ultra thin stainless steel or brass shims with some prior experience on gear mesh tuning during my RC days put to good use here.

Some gearing abuse wear and metal shaving bits. Needs cleaning and grease reapplication.

Damage count #3. Upon removing the main gear to clean up the used grease, there were signs of more than usual wear and some worrying metal shaving bits found. This could be due to cat cranking abuse and possibly inappropriate gear mesh free play as stated above.

Pinion gear shaft wear. Some abuse aftermath.

Out comes the pinion gear shaft. Some signs of wear,  slightly more than expected probably due to barras and cats abuse. Pictured, #1 is supported by the one-way (anti-reverse) bearing shaft, #2 being supported by a stainless steel ball bearing while the far right tip (past the gears) is being supported by a thin bushing which I believe is teflon or some other materials. This is where Shimano makes a difference with some of it's reel designs with another ball bearing, they call it their 'x-ship' system.

Anti reverse clutch (one way needle bearings), a little lose and abused. Cleaned and new oil needed.

Upon closer inspection around the one-way bearing (anti-reverse clutch) housing, #1 being the one-way bearing shaft, #2 being the white plastic needle bearing housing, excessive abuse resulted in more than usual wear and tear with some free play wobble and also slight inefficient anti-reverse stopping with a slight back play before stopping. This is the cause for the rotor wobble, not exactly a reel breaker that starts to grind against the body, but manageable so long as it's not being used to haul big cats or feisty fights.

The shaft and housing's been removed, cleaned and lightly lubed with special one-way bearing oil (not grease) and the anti-reverse stop seems to have improved slightly.

Pimp it up! No love for line roller bushings, Hot love for Hybrid Ceramic Bearings!

Finally, a quick check on the line roller reveals plenty of gunk jammed in preventing the roller to spin properly causing occasional line twists and fried bihun. Easily fixed by replacing the brass+plastic bushing with a ceramic hybrid ball bearing and some micro shims to fine tune the bearing placement to a glove like fit.

This seems to be the spot that gets most water intrusion and best to have long lasting bearings like ceramic hybrids to avoid premature failures.

All in all, reel's been serviced, tuned and lightly pimped up with some nifty ceramic hybrid bearings. Buddy is happy again that the reel's revived.

On to the next battle!