Has anyone tried this reel yet? It looks interesting. If you haven't heard about it, this is the major difference. There are 5 gears. One large gear with teeth pointed in. 3 planet gears and one gear that goes inbetween the three planet gears. This is supposedly better but I don't know about that. Smaller gears have better tendency to break or get stripped right?

What do you guys think of this reel?

One of the most common devices on the internal combustion engine, the water pump, suffers most of it failures due to a warn bearing. The bearing wears as pressure is constantly applied from from one direction which causes gradual and then rapid failure of the bearing, requiring replacement of the pump. Some new vehicles have electric water pumps where the drive system is perfectly in line with the pump and virtualy zero wear. No side loading offers free spinning, smooth operaton and a long living water pump.

A typical conventional fishing reel has it's power source, the handle, offset to the main drive gear and pinion. When turned under heavy load there is much pressure applied form one direction and the unit's gears themself are unbalanced. The EON aligns all of the gears and the handle assembly in one, perfectly aligned power train, which offers balance that would be impossible in a conventional conventional (hehehe :P ) as well as even distribution of all power from the handle onto the gears. Due to the way the gears are arrayed and the handle is centered, it also allows far more space for your drag setup...

All of that said, I looked at a couple pre-production EONs at the ABU booth during the MSBA show. I was not impressed. For starters, the capacity of the spools were small. The 6600 is about the size os a small 5000 and would not be a big game replacement under any circumstance. The "feel" of the EON was very plasticy and cheap and not as solid and free flowing as I had expected. Again, this was a pre-production reel and I haven't played with the real one yet (are they out?) ... I will say is that it was very well balanced but my initial impression screams for some better quality in the parts and definitely larger capacities...