John Keane
Well-known member
Was thinking about your plight in the local Angling superstore this afternoon and saw these two 3000/4000 sized reels with nice wide, shallow spools. The black one is a Fox and the silver one is an Abu.
I keep meaning to try my old Mitchell Match 410 which I don’t think I’ve used since the early 90’s, it’s still in a fairly good condition and I have lots of spare spools for it.
I think I will give it a try to see if it’s as good as I remember it being; thanks Mark.
Keith
do you both mean the 440a rather than the 410?
iirc Mitchell made 3 finger dab bail reels with progressively faster gearing
the otomatic (330) was black
the match (440) was originally dark blue in the late sixties, went through a paler blue and end up as black in the very late incarnations.
and the 840 was a very dark brown
but my memory could be flawed.
If I was in the market for a new reel that is not Daiwa or Shimano, I would be looking at cadence (lot of reel for the money allegedly) or Okuma (I've had decent reels from them but not recently)
I wouldn’t recommend the Mitchells to another angler ... but they suit me: Finger dab, brilliant spool and line lay, durable. One of my 440a matches i’ve Had for 37 years now and it’s used plenty.Cadence reels are all 6.1 ratio Alex,which imv is too quick and imparts too much twist,a maximum of 5.1 seems better(unless a drennan fd 4000),I was looking before the ninja. As for the Mitchell's I always used 440 matches,but I would have preferred 330's,but they had stopped producing them before i realised,believing fast was always best for a match angler,wrong...
I have a Shimano spool which is very shallow and takes just 100 meters of 0.18 line (or 170 meters of 0.14 line), and it has ‘4000M’ printed on its side (see pic below) so it shows that not all of Shimanos 4000 series reels were designed with 4, 6 and 8lb lines in mind.
It was made for the ‘Shimano Super-X Aero GTM 4000 Match reel’ but I bought it many years ago because it fitted nicely on one of my other older Shimano reels at the time.
Keith
Many years ago I bought two Shimano aero match III's,made in Japan and have two match spools each,they are still sound,my problem is they are rear drag,I wouldn't get rid of them mind...
I think we've conversed before on the subject of how to avoid the dreaded "bump" on closure of the bail with the match.
Actually - an ABU 501 might b a good solution to this request.