Have any of you done this? It may be a trick the old-timers did to their squidders to make them very fine.
Take a brand-new reel and clean all the grease out of it. Then pack the reel with toothpaste and start cranking. Crank the handle all winter long. When your good and sick of it, clean the toothpaste out and grease as you normally would. The reel should be a caster's dream.

Never done it that way.... but in my trade sometimes we have to grind stuff down so we use silicon carbide grit that comes in different grades.... So instead of toothpaste, you could put a slury of 600 grit silicon carbide in there and crank for a while....Anything in a larger grit size might do damage

Eben if I pack it, will you crank?
My right hand is pretty tired from all that ice breaking.

I have done it on a line machine. fill it with TP and press pedal down with a block and walk away for 10 min.
Nice and smooth.
You would be surprised what the TP looks like after.:p

I may give it a try. The reels these days are pretty smooth right out of the box though. Cranking the handle and watching the Bruins. For the good old days of bass stands, and swords finning right off the bluffs.

I want to write a grant proposal to rebuild a bass stand the way they used to look.... maybe out at brental point or beaver tail... I know there would be insurance problems and people would climb all over it and maybe trash it, but how cool would it be to fish off a stand :D

Try cleaning the bearings of grease and using 3in1 oil instead.Your just going to have to oil regularly instead of once a year.What would you use to clean out the tooth paste ???WATER??--I still use an old 980 mag to chunk with and I did bearings with a synthetic grease but after a couple of casts cleaned it out and went back to oil.Its like night and day.Its not bad in real hot wheather but in spring and fall grease gets to thick with cold.I even like the 3in1 over the rocket oil.

Bawana--it is a trick i read somewhere about lapping in the gears of a bait-casting reel. The procedure takes care of any minute spurs and uneven surfaces on the machined parts of the reel.
Its a Boyd Pfeiffer trick. Dated perhaps but still worth a thought.

To polish the reel you need to take it apart and pack the side plates and the level-wind mechanism with a fifty-fifty mixture of grease and toothpaste. Pfeiffer recommends Pearl Drops toothpaste--he feels it is the most abrasive toothpaste around. The grease serves to suspend the toothpaste.
It takes from eight to twenty hours to polish the gears. He says you can do it in front of the tube or, as he does, rigs a motor that turns at 100 rpm's.
Periodically your going to have to repack the worm gears and the pawl. Remove toothpaste with warm soapy water and use a degreaser to remove the old grease.
He says when your done you'll have the casting reel of your dreams.
I'm off to CVS to find me some Pearl Drops toothpaste--anyone ever heard of it? :D

I bet lava hand soap would work too... Its got all that pumice in it

i break mine in on fish and off the rocks

:bshake:

Thanks GF I thought you ment for the bearings.will have to try this for gears.I wonder if polishing compound for car mixed in with grease would work.Pumice would be way to much I think.I used to use that to take the Glaze off the rubber rollers in a web printing press and the stuff is pretty rough but who knows for gears it might work.