Building a fishing reel from scratch is not easy.
Plenty of anglers are the "do-it-yourself" type. Almost everyone has tried building their own piece of fishing gear at least once. Maybe you tie flies. Maybe you built a rod storage system out of PVC piping for your boat. Maybe you did something as simple as re-purposing a piece of scrap metal as a cheap, makeshift anchor for your boat.
Some people take that DIY attitude a little bit more seriously than others. Enter Marling Baits, a YouTuber who has soared in popularity the last few years for his hand-carved and wholly original fishing lures.
This time, he takes thing a step further than ever before with a project to build a fully functional spinning reel mostly from scratch materials. This is the final video in a nearly five-part series as the reel ending up being more difficult to build than he ever imagined.
This may be one of the most ambitious fishing projects we have ever seen anyone undertake on the Internet. Seeing all the problems he had to engineer and overcome in the late stages of this project makes us realize how much we take our favorite fishing reels for granted. It takes some serious problem-solving skills, engineering know-how and patience to put something like this together! Most people would have simply resorted to using a computer and a 3-D printer. To craft all the gears and other inner workings by hand? Amazing.
This may not have been the smoothest spinning reel ever created, but you must respect the man for the incredible effort that went into such an ambitious project. There is a big difference between building a piece of mechanical hardware and simply carving out experimental lures like he usually does.
It is a shame he did not get the chance to see how the reel performed once a fish took the bait, but we are still blown away. We will be curious to see if he attempts this experiment again with a ton of experience and better ideas on how to make it work better next time.
For more outdoor content from Travis Smola, be sure to follow him on Twitter and check out his Geocaching and Outdoors with Travis YouTube channels.
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