Significant ABU Friends
Another great friend to ABU fans is Dave Brown from UK and has been modifying ABU reels for tournament casting for many years.
Dave's work can be seen on the Dutch
website
http://casting.lismore.nl/
Dave's Tournament modified ABU reels can be bought by looking at his offerings on Ebay using his alias w1144
Dave and I have been corresponding over some months and below is some of his informative contributions.
Wayne
As promised a small piece about tournament reels,
i have been converting ABU Ambassadeur reels since the mid 1980,s my first
attempts were simply removing the levelwind mech and associated gears and
adding a "CT" bar to increase the speed the spool can run at and also allow
a great amount of grip on the spool that a top cross bar cannot give.This
was based on a very rare version of the ABU 6500c that ABU built in limited
numbers and called the 6500 CT ,being unavailable it was simply copied using
parts made by myself ,around the same time the Ultramag range of reels were
being used more and more for casting however in standard form were pretty
useless ,but with a few modifications were fantastic casting reels and are
still popular over 20 years later .
Around 1990 ABu re introduced the rare Black 6500 Ct ready to use tournament reel this time using its Ultracast spool and using a pair of fibre brake blocks for braking soon after they brought out an almost identical model the 6500 CT Rocket this lead to a variety of similar models the 6500 Ct Sports Rocket in both original and MK11 versions then the 6500 C3 CT Elite then the 6500 C3 CT Mag Elite .All of these models could be cast without modification but it didn,t take long before small adjustments and improvements were being made ,usually the sideplate were drilled and either a single rare earth magnet and adjuster was added or a centre mag conversion fitted were a platic mag ring was fitted that operated by a knob that ran through the center of the sideplate .
The majority of the reels i currently convert are
the 1980,s type XLT or Ultramag type reels ,they are completely stripped
down then all the levelwind mechanism and plastic cage supports removed i
then fit my own special polished one piece aluminium bar this hold the cage
rigid and allows a perfect grip of the spool.The sideplates are then
machined to accept either a single rare earth magnetic brake or a captive
adjuster that operates a nylon mag ring holding several smaller magnets .All
of these modifications are for one reason and that is to give a caster the
ultimate personal adjustment required to enable him to cast as far as
possible and yet still have full control over spool speed .The factory
magged reels don,t have this adjustment and so can hold a casters distance
back its also nice to know that the magnets can adjust the spin time of a
reel anywhere from 5 seconds to 3 minutes all achieved by one magnet .
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Hopefully we will see more of Dave's modifications and perhaps you will be able to contact him directly via e-mail here in future with a view to ordering a special reel. |
