ON A TRIP THROUGH Mississippi, I once saw an elderly man catching catfish using nothing but a coffee can as a "reel." Strange as it may have looked, his can accomplished a reel's simplest purpose: it held his line. And for many fly fishermen, this is almost all a reel does. On the other hand, saltwater anglers sometimes need serious stopping power, and many big-game reels look like a brake array on a racecar. Between the coffee can and the engineering marvel is a whole range of technology that many anglers understand only vaguely.

When manufacturers proclaim the virtues of their drag systems in advertisements and catalogs, they toss around terms such as "startup inertia," and "cork to Rulon," and "fully sealed," often without fully explaining what these things are and why they are beneficial to anglers. If you stop to think about it, these terms raise a lot of questions about how reels are built and how they work. I set out to address these questions and more. What I learned may help you the next time you peer into that glass case at the fly shop — you'll have a better grip on why objects with such a simple purpose vary so much in complexity ... and price.

Reel Differences

"Fundamentally, a reel is like a bicycle wheel," says Waterworks/Lamson's Ryan Harrison. "You've got a hub or arbor in the middle, with a larger wheel around the outside. In bikes, that larger wheel holds the tire, but on a fly reel, it holds line." And the similarities don't end there: "If you want to slow down a bike, you've got to have a brake, right?" continues Harrison. "Well, a fly reel's drag is the brake." And, just as a bicycle brake would flip you over the handlebars if you applied it too quickly, so too will a fly reel's drag snap your fish off if the drag engages too suddenly.

"So what we need is a smooth brake," explains Orvis's vice president of rod and tackle, Jim Lepage. "And there are several ways to get to that point." Historically, fly reels were designed with a "spring and pawl" drag, which worked by bouncing a triangle of metal (the clicker or "pawl") along the teeth of a gear on the reel's spool, tensioned by a small, inexpensive spring (often nothing more than a bendable metal strip pushing against the mechanism). That method accomplished the goal of slowing the spool — and allowed low-cost manufacturing with the stamping technology available at the time — but it didn't slow smoothly, and the amount of pressure that could be applied was limited. "I was responsible for killing the old CFO click-and-pawl reel," continues Lepage, "or at least, I gave the order. In reality, people just didn't buy it when offered a disc-drag reel for the same price."

Most anglers today are familiar with disc drag, because ever since the late 1990s it's been the primary focus of reel design and advertising. Fundamentally, a disc drag slows the spool by friction, by applying pressure between two discs, usually one on the spool and one on the frame. That concept, simple as it sounds, is the source of almost all the myriad modern drag designs.

Why so much variation? Because disc drags create a lot of problems, which make for a lot of solutions. The simplest, but by no means necessarily cheapest, disc drag is probably the "draw-bar drag." A draw-bar drag is characterized by two brake surfaces — often resembling flat, cork (or synthetic) doughnuts — with one on the inside of the spool and the other mounted inside the frame. When the spool is attached to the frame, these two doughnuts meet, and through their center goes the arbor — the central cylinder where you first start winding the line. Having the brake pads go around the arbor maximizes the area available for a braking surface, meaning the drag can be stronger, and distributes the drag surface evenly around the reel, reducing wobble and making the drag smoother.

When the draw-bar drag is deactivated — that is, when the drag knob is loosened completely — the spool can turn freely inside the frame in both directions, because the pads don't touch. Crank the drag down, and suddenly the reel goes easily in only one direction. How does that happen? When you twist the drag-setting knob, you are turning a screw, which is shortening the "bar" or central spindle of the reel, thus "drawing" the spool tighter to the frame (hence the name, "draw-bar"). As when you are tightening any screw, the friction between the two surfaces increases depending on the pressure you apply, allowing you to adjust your drag. And where the frame and the spool touch, you'll find your two braking surfaces making carefully controlled contact to smoothly slow your spool without any breakable gears and pawls.

How come the reel can still turn in one direction when the spool is now sandwiched to the frame? A good question: the entire drag assembly is engineered to turn with the spool, but only in one direction. When the spool tries to go the other way, a clutch engages, locking the frame-side brake pad tight to the frame and forcing the spool side pad to turn against it, under friction, thus generating drag. On some reels, you can hear this clutch bouncing along as an incoming click.

Disc Problems

None of that is very complicated once you get the idea, but reel manufacturers have encountered some problems, especially when the reel is under heavy drag at high speed. The first of those is heat. In higher-end reels, "heat is an issue because it can liquefy the grease and materials around the bushings or bearings, the surfaces the reel turns on," says Nautilus's Andreas Mustad. "So we have to develop ways of blocking the heat. Our drag uses cork as a hot-pad. The cork surface backs up our carbon drag, which is strong but generates a lot of heat, and that hot pad bounces the heat back out into the spool itself, away from the bearings. The spool then acts like a giant heat-sink, allowing it to dissipate."

Another issue with high-performance drags is maintenance, which affects whether the drag can be sealed or open. Ryan Harrison explains: "Cork drag is great stuff: it's smooth, compresses nicely, and has good friction. But it has a downside too; you have to maintain it." Cork is actually a tree bark, and cork drags include some rubber bits to hold them together. Cork drags thus require regular applications of an appropriate lubricant to keep the organic material from drying out and cracking. Because it must be maintained, cork must be accessible, requiring an open design, with the drag surfaces visible inside the body. If sand or other material gets between the brake pads, you've got a problem.

As Bauer Reels' Jon Bauer explains, even water between the pads affects performance. "Any time water gets between spinning, flat discs, it is going to interfere. Most makers address this problem with grease to seal water out or slot designs to channel water away, but it can be a problem." Many manufacturers have developed sealed drags, with the brake pads contained within a sealed cylinder, usually protected by rubber O-rings. These drags are maintenance-free and are not subject to hydroplaning or grit issues, but in order to be so, they have to sacrifice all materials that might require regular checkups, which means no cork.

Sealed designs allow the entire drag array, including the spool's brake pad, to stay on the frame; the system is complete only when the spool is reattached and locked back to its brake. Thus, if you pop the spool off, you won't see the brake surface itself but rather the sealed back of the spool-side pad. Unlike with the cork drags, which open for maintenance, these systems hide their parts. Although the mechanical principle employed by these drags to tighten their brake surfaces is the same as on the draw-bar design, most manufacturers prefer to call them "drum" or "sealed disc" drags. The distinction lies in where the drags keep their brake pads. On a true "draw-bar," the pads are large discs visible between the spool and the frame. On the "drum drag," these pads are smaller, contained within the arbor of the reel. As a result, many drum drags lack the sheer stopping power of the draw-bar, although they may make up for it in other ways.

Synthetic-drag reels most often employ carbon, Delrin, or Rulon plastics (or some
combination of these materials) as brake surfaces, backed up by a spring system to maintain tension. Rulon and Delrin are both extremely dense composite plastics, based on fluorocarbon and nylon, respectively. "They last more or less forever," says Orvis's Lepage, "and you don't need to maintain them since they are self-lubricating." On the other hand, neither one compresses, so the "ramp up" or increase in tension from when the fish begins to take line to when it hits maximum drag isn't as smooth. That means an increase in "startup inertia."

What exactly is startup inertia anyway? Any surface that drags, from fly reels to airplane wings, is measured by its "friction coefficient." A fly reel that has a friction coefficient of zero would have no start up inertia, no resistance to movement, meaning that the second a fish began to take line, the reel would start rotating as smoothly as if it were at top speed. Unfortunately, we know from Physics 101 that objects at rest like to stay at rest, and reels are no different. In fact, no reel has zero startup inertia, although some designs boast very low (almost negligible) numbers. On the other hand, some materials, such as carbon fiber, have high coefficients of friction — good for stopping power, but bad for startup inertia. Designers are constantly balancing these two factors.

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