On 10/31/2025 at 8:18 AM, redmeansdistortion said:

Keep in mind that Cal is a little on the nitpicky side of things.  That's his job as a reviewer.  In practice, the Ambassadeurs don't lack cranking power.  Are they as powerful as something with a larger drive gear?  Not necessarily, but here's where things get interesting.  Abus use deeper gears, which will have more torque on tap than a faster set of gears of a similar diameter.  The larger diameter spool in this case is what "speeds up" the reel, since more line is wound every turn around the circumference of the spool.  As an example, every fall I swap my faster 2500C gears from 6.3:1 to the factory 5.3:1 for steelhead fishing.  I lose about 5" per turn, but now I have more oomph on the bottom end which is more important than speed in that scenario.  I'm after fish in that 5-10lb range that have a lot of fight in them.  The difference in torque is very noticeable, especially on the 30mm dia spool in that particular reel.  Retrieve speed drops from 23" to 18" per turn, but I run a shorter handle which I can crank much faster to make up for it.  There is no free lunch.  You can have torque or speed or try to find a nice balance. 

 

On that note, I've had plenty of Daiwa and Shimano models in my shop with gear brinnelling.  This is only in the faster geared models.  Brinnelling is when the gear teeth become malformed from stress. During the cleaning process, I sometimes find metal shavings.   The reel may operate smoothly, but there will be an unusual amount of noise coming from the gearbox.  The easiest way to find it is to thoroughly clean the gears and check for discoloration on the pinion, specifically where it contacts the drive gear.  If it appears off color, that is brinnelling and no lubrication will fix it.  The reel will still be perfectly usable, it'll just be a little chatterbox until the gears are replaced.  I've seen it mostly with the Tatula platform and Shimanos with micro gearing.  When you read of people saying their reel now sounds geary, brinnelling is the most likely culprit.  It usually happens from fighting fish with the drag set too high or pulling snags with the drag locked.  Brinnelling is much less common in Ambassadeurs due to the thicker teeth hobbed into the gears.

You would think that would be a more serious issue with Shimano vs Daiwa.  Its fitting that the 2 largest and overall best large reel manufacturers like Shimano and Daiwa have polar opposite mentalities relative to tooth design.  The smaller micro module design have more teeth mating when compared to Daiwa's larger Digi gear.  I'm curious if anyone has done the math and compared the overall surface area between Daiwa and Shimano.

Ive been impressed ith the newer Penn gears.  While they arent Daiwa/Shimano smooth, they have gotten worlds better.  Also, the gears themselves handle wear better than I expected, the teeth just look polished.   

 

8 hours ago, GetFishorDieTryin said:

You would think that would be a more serious issue with Shimano vs Daiwa.  Its fitting that the 2 largest and overall best large reel manufacturers like Shimano and Daiwa have polar opposite mentalities relative to tooth design.  The smaller micro module design have more teeth mating when compared to Daiwa's larger Digi gear.  I'm curious if anyone has done the math and compared the overall surface area between Daiwa and Shimano.

Ive been impressed ith the newer Penn gears.  While they arent Daiwa/Shimano smooth, they have gotten worlds better.  Also, the gears themselves handle wear better than I expected, the teeth just look polished.   

 

I don't believe it's surface area that is the cause, but the quality of the materials in general.  I actually had a discussion about this with Simon Shimomura not long before he debuted his 6.3:1 2500C gears.  He didn't use micro teeth like Avail, a company that also offers faster 2500C gears.  His word was that they are structurally weaker due to those finer teeth.  The teeth in his gears are massive and while they are comparably noisier than the Avail gears, they are still just as smooth.  Brinnelling just wasn't nearly as common in the old days like it is now.  I've been through quite a few reels, some of them fished hard for many decades, and the gears were just fine.  None of those had micro gearing as that wasn't even a thing until recently. 

 

Something that must be understood about reels is they are relatively simple machines.  When you get down to it, they are really only complex for the sake of complexity and not functionality.  Now most are designed and manufactured under a planned obsolescence model.  Aside from the advances in braking systems, most everything else is there just to move products off of store shelves.  Speed, lightness, max drag capacity, and bearing count are what sells reels.  It's all a numbers game, and as humans we are born with that mentality to seek abundance, that more is better.  The marketing departments know this, and they forward the memo to the engineering team.