TackleTour

The "plastic" worm gear many are worried about is a composition material developed by Shimano engineers over time and test for hundreds of hours for wear factor before deciding to use it. The advantage they found is a much smoother worm gear function over metal, especially on the line guide pawl teeth.

The plastic idle gears on levelwind reels is an intentional strip point for if and when that line guide gets stuck or jammed to avoid catastrophic failure of the rest of the drive train, the plastic worm gear however is a relatively new design to improve levelwind performance hey? I do see worm gear and pawl wear in theses areas that need replacing from time to time on conventional metal ones so will be interested to see over the next few years how the plastic ones go.

The only reel I have ever broken the plastic idle gear (part 2154) on was a Shimano Core 51MG7. Had a mid slot sized Redfish on and noticed line was bunching up to one side. Heard some terrible crunching noise and had to do some tricky hand-lining to bring it to the boat. BTW, that reel has a metal worm shaft. It looked like the pawl failed on the metal worm shaft. Still a great reel. Stuff is going to break from time to time.

I chuckle every time I read about the woes of the plastic worm shaft on the Curado 70. I have caught countless oversized Redfish (15-20lbs) on my Curado 70s with nary a failure. Here is a picture of a Red I caught Tuesday in the Biloxi Marsh on a Phase 3 Eiger Northwall matched up with the plastic Curado 70. 37" and 17lbs on the Boga.