Last Tuesday, a tackle shop owner from Australia sent me a broken spinning reel from a very famous brand. He asked me, “Max, why does this reel feel like a coffee grinder after only one season of surfcasting?”
I opened the side plate, and the answer was obvious: Zinc alloy drive gears.
To be brutally honest, I understand why many factories use zinc. It’s cheap, it’s easy to die-cast by the thousands, and when a reel is brand new sitting in a display case, a zinc gear feels perfectly smooth. But as a manufacturer who specializes in heavy-duty saltwater gear, I absolutely hate it.
When you hook a 20kg Tuna or try to pull a massive sinker through crashing surf, zinc simply doesn’t have the structural integrity. The teeth micro-fracture. The meshing wears down. Suddenly, your customer is standing on the beach with a jammed reel and a lost fish.
That’s exactly why at Armor Reels, we made a strict rule for our offshore and surfcasting series: CNC Machined Solid Brass only.
Yes, buying raw marine-grade brass costs us way more. Yes, running CNC machines to carve each individual gear tooth takes ten times longer than pouring liquid zinc into a mold. When I walk through our machining floor, the noise is deafening, but the result is worth it. Brass has a natural self-lubricating property and impact resistance that zinc can never match.
If you are a tackle distributor or shop owner buying wholesale, stop looking only at the ball bearing count on the box. Ask your supplier: “What is the main gear made of?” If it’s going into the saltwater, if it’s fighting big game, it better be brass.
If you want to see the difference a solid brass core makes in a heavy-duty reel, drop me an email. I’ll send you a sample of our inner workings.