Tailor Made By V. Huttley - The Lucky 7 Oberon Fly Reels - Part 2

It's been over a week since Part 1 of the Lucky 7 Oberon fly reel series with Tailor Made By V. Huttley and in this update Vince goes in depth with the step by step on how the spools are each made in this limited edition series.

I'm sure that I am not the only one that geeks out about seeing how the process goes in creating these fly reels step by painstaking step.

Vince wrote...  "Now for those interested, and that can decipher the gibberish, please read on but I would hope the photos do a better job of explaining each step.

The next stop of the Lucky 7 Oberon fly reels is the completion of the spools.  Much like the bodies, I start with a rough cut billet and true the face and diameter in the lathe.  Next,  I flip it around and face groove the rear to allow clearance for the pawl drag system and machine the spigot for the gear to press home at the assembly stage.  Whilst at this step, I drill and finish bore the spool for the bearings then move onto the grooving of the spool.  This is my least favourite part mostly due to the fact my little lathe does not have enough grunt to remove material quickly.  I rough the groove to about 0.5mm over size and set aside to complete the rest. 

Once all are done they are re-chucked to hold on the rear to give me full access to the face to complete, bringing all dimensions to their final size and blending in radius on the inside of the spool and spool face with scrapers, much like the bodies.  I give the face a quick sand to check everything looks nice and uniform and done!

For the milling step I've been modifying my little bench top mill to CNC and so far it's progressing quite well but it's still nowhere near complete.  I'm still wanting to add in an auto tool changer and beef up the spindle but all these steps are a huge time suck and I need to nut out a few things before I make the jump.  It works adequately for now and is surprisingly reliable.  

For this step I spent some time in Solidworks to accurately sketch the spool to program the hole placement and produce a code for the machine to read.  I import this code into the machine, select the tooling that I want to use and tech the machines its homing parameters.  We are in business to a point as I still have to manually change tools and watch every step like a hawk.  It's pretty satisfactory when each come out the chuck after spend so many hours getting this machine reliable. 

For the next update I'll be moving onto porting the bodies and reel feet."

There are only two of the Lucky 7 Oberon fly reels still available so send Vince an email to put your name on one if interested.

Make sure you visit the Tailor Made By V. Huttley website and follow along through Facebook and Instagram too.