Greasing Drag Washers?

[rwilhelm]

I know this subject has come up before but I did a search and nothing came up. Are drag washers supposed to be greased or left dry? I am talking about the metal, teflon, and the Penn HT-100?

[ProfessorM]

I think Penn washers should be left dry. That is what I do. Shimano puts grease on theirs. Different type of washers though. Teflon is slippery enough without grease. P.M.

[slapshot]

There is a guy over on THT that swears these are the tits, and argues that any other method is junk. I use smooothie drag washers in my Abu 6500-7000 reels, dry. Never had a drag problem/failure. I think the type of fishing he is talking about is mostly tuna (fish that take long hard runs). For stripers, I have never had a drag failure with dry drag washers. I've used the smoooothies in a 6500 series reel on school BFT to 30 pounds and albies/bonito without any issues as well.

[Roger]

I've had lots of issues with dry ht-100s failing. Mostly when trolling wire, and I suspect it has to do with water intruding into the drag area. The fellow on THT advocates using Shimano star drag grease on those (a teflon based syn grease). Apparently he services hundreds of reels as a sideline and has found this to be very effective. Personally, I've greased up the ht-100s on my 113s and will probably do the same on a 710 that I converted to manual pickup. I'll let you know the results next year when I take them down again.

Meanwhile, I'll have to find some fish big enough to test the drags.

[spence]

I just greased some HT-100's with a little SuperLube...

-spence