Perplexing Problem

[Dave Barnett]

I am a big fan of the "old" Garcia Mitchell Open face spinning reels. My wife found a really nice 301 at a yard sale a while back. As I have several reels already. I put it up to save for future use. With wintertime here and a large snow accumulation, I dug the reel out the other day to pass the time. I figured I would grease it and clean it up and change the line. The reel is a standard Garcia Mitchell 301. It has the crank on the left side and is NOT interchangeable to the right side. As I was working it over I screwed the crank off to oil the bearings in the crank. It hit me like a ton of bricks. The crank screwed the WRONG WAY. My other 300's 301's and 209's have left hand thread on them so that when "reeled" the handle tightens. With this reel it screws off the reel completely. There are no cotter pin holes and the spindle is too small to accept one. Is this reel a factory fluke? Reeling backward isn't an option. Besides being silly and hard to do it opposes the bail. I put some gorilla glue on it and screwed it back on tight but I know that given time it will work looses again. Does anyone have any ideas about this??? God Bless and thanks for any input. Dave

 

[rolmops]

Re: Perplexing Problem

It looks like you picked up an old "lefty".
They were made for left handed people,but without having changed anything on the inside.The end result is a left handed reel that has to be used while rolling it "backward"
I remember considering buying one in the sixties,but the sales man strongly advised against it arguing that it would be far more comfortable to learn to use a right handed reel

 

[Dave Barnett]

Re: Perplexing Problem

The only thing about it is that if you do roll it backward the bail doesn't pick up the line. The reel works fine with the exception of the handle screwing off when you reel it. maybe it was just a factory goof?