I picked up a set of daiwa emblem black editions for a bargain recently, a real workhorse of a reel and ideal for fishing the 30 acres of water. However, without the bait runner facility I decided to look into the quick drag option - it turns out that to buy the spool caps would have set me by £75 - not really something I wanted to do (the reels weren't much more!). A bit of googling about and I decided to give it a go doing it myself.
The spool cap has 10 plastic welds in it. These needed to be melted out one by one (easy with a soldering iron I guess - more timely without, but a flame and needle soon sorted it). After about half an hour of messing about with them, all three reels had the welds removed. Doesn't look pretty but you don't see it once all back together.
Once this is removed, the spring is revealed. The drag is spring tensioned, hence it takes a lot of turns to change it from 'free spool' to 'fish playing' modes. Remove the spring, and it can be changed from one to the other with have a turn on the drag. The spring lifts out easily.
Next up, the spool needs looking at. Within the spool, there are a load of washers. Four of them are fabric - these need changing to plastic washers, that you can pick up for £4 or so from ebay (search Daiwa reel conversion).
First, remove the clip that keeps everything in place, then one by one, remove the washers, keeping them in order as you go.
All of the fabric washers are replaced with the plastic ones - as below. The washers are then replaced, one by one, being careful to do it in order.
Only thing left to do, is to put the spool back on, test it out and off you go. Free spool to drag with have a turn. Make sure you keep hold of the old components, in case you want it to go back to how it was. Also, it might be worth using a bit of araldite on the spool cap if there is too much play in the spool cap.
Now time to try them out - looking forward to it
