I am a big fan of the "old" Garcia Mitchell Open face spinning reels. My wife 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. 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 301's 209's and 300'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???
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Thanks for any input. God Bless. Dave
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Sounds like its more of a factory fluke.
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I think I might have a solution and I even think you could test this theory with your other reels. What I'm thinking is the previous owner took the handle off a right hand retrieve reel and placed it on your left hand reel. They might have tried to do a quick fix and when the found out it didn't work out they might have put it away and forgot about it.
I worked it out in my head (I don't have any Garcia Mitchell reels to try this out on) and it seems to work when I just think about it. What you might want to do is take the handle off one of you right hand retrieve reels and put it on a left hand retrieve reel. If you have both models that is. Let me know what you think and what happens if you can try this out.
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The more I think about it the more I might think that I am wrong...I wish I knew my thread patterns better! haha
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That was a good bit of thinking. I too overlooked the left/right thread pattern idea on the first go around. I would think that this is one of the old 60's models that was made to reel backwards for lefties. The prob there isthat the bail opposes it that way and the only way it can reel backwards is to turn the reel lock off. I recon it's just one of the flukes or something. I sure do appreciate you taking the time to help me out. God Bless. Dave
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