accusleeves - 9/1/2010

[alantani]

accusleeves - 9/1/2010

a question was asked on bloody decks about sleeving the bearings of accurate reels.

Freespool Sleeve

it's really pretty simple. here's the post that describes the general process.

cutting a bearing sleeve

i've actually sleeved all of my own personal accurates. the freespool really is very nice. perhaps one of the best things about accurate reels is that the tolerances are so tight. you could measure out a sleeve for any single reel, knock out another hundred sleeves, and pretty much be right on the money for all of the rest. that's how well made the accurate reel is. so my friend jim cut a few sleeves for me. he set them up so that they are 3-4 thousanths too long. remember that a piece of paper is 3 thousanths of an inch thick.



a black and gray single speed boss 270 was send in with really bad freespool. i pulled the spool and gave it a spin with no load on the bearings. i got 15 seconds of freespool.



then i pushed in on the spring and put a load on the bearings and got 6 seconds of freespool.



i pulled the bearings out, and remove the shields.





then i cleaned the bearings with carb cleaner and compressed air. the new lube i'm using is TSI 301. very impressive stuff. the spin times are not as good as xtreme reel +, but it lasts much longer.



i put the spool back together with the newly cleaned and lubed bearings and gave the spool a spin. with no load on the bearings, i got 70 seconds of spin time.



then i pressed in on the pressure plate to compress the springs a little and the spin time dropped to 10 seconds. yup, that's 10 seconds under a load with bearings that had just been cleaned and lubed.



well, let's try a bearing sleeve. here's the one that jim cut for me, based on measurements from another reel. when i put it all together, you could feel just a slight amount of play that indicated that the sleeve was in fact a few thousanths too long.



here is what the whole assembly will look like when you're done.



i gave the spool a spin without putting a load on the bearings. things must be loosening up, because i got 80 seconds worth of spin.



then i put a load on the springs and the freespool time was 75 seconds, virtually unchanged.



but the proof is in the pudding. i reassembled the reel and gave the spool a spin. yup, 80 seconds of freespool!



now for the disclaimer. this is only one reel. to come up with any kind of solid conclusions, we would need a hundred reels and a plan to systematically eliminate variables. yeah, like i've got time to do something like that. so it looks good, but no one is going to do the study to determine if these differences are statistically significant. if you try this at home, your results may vary. or not........