Fly Reels - Combination Reels
Fly Reels - Power & Speed by Henschel®

The "Power & Speed"  -

- The Combination Reel with the outstanding design

- The Combination Reel with the largest arbor and the highest speed retrieve

- The Combination Reel for the fastest fish.

Numerous conversations and articles have discussed the advantages and disadvantages of the Large Arbor reels in the past few years.

This discussion often centers around how fast line should be wound up in order to eliminate slack line when a fast fish runs toward the fisherman.

The concept of the large arbor reel is simple to understand:

The larger the spool arbor the greater the length of line that is retrieved on one revolution of the reel. All fishermen learned this in school.

(The circumference of a circle is Pi x the diameter of the circle.)

But this principle must be combined with how many revolutions the spool turns to find out how fast a reel can retrieve line.

A number of well known casting reels, and some fly reels (called multipliers), use mechanics to accelerate, or multiply the number of spool revolutions achievedwith one revolution of the crank.

One casting reel produces 3.2 spool revolutions per crank revolution.

This reel with a spool diameter of approximately 2 inches picks up about 18 inches of line with one crank revolution.

To achieve this line retrieval rate in a large arbor reel, the spool would have to be a minimum of 6 3/8 inches and a maximum diameter of about 8 inches!

(Henschel Reels has not pursued a multiplier solution to the retrieval of slack line because of the added weight the gears would add to the reel and our concern for the dependability of this system in saltwater fly fishing conditions.)

Since increasing only the arbor size and the same outside diameter only limits the amount of available backing on the reel, so we have increased the size of the reel. To maximize the number of revolutions a fisherman can generate on a fly reel, the radius of the crank handle must be kept within a "wrist retrieve" range. When a large arbor reel increases the radius of the crank handle beyond the "wrist retrieve" range, the fisherman must use his arm to crank the reel.

When this happens, the number of revolutions a fisherman can generate drops considerably.

(A fisherman can pick up line faster with a non large arbor reel with the wrist retrieve motion than another fisherman can pick up line with a large arbor reel with an arm crank motion.) Another consideration in crank radius is the power needed to retrieve a fish with a small radius handle. The crank functions as a lever and as such the small radius crank requires more power to "crank-in" a fish.

From these considerations, the Power & Speed" reel was developed. This is a large arbor reels designed for large fish.

The reel is a Combination reel like the Dual Mode and the Ulti Mode, but has a very large arbor with a unique crank. The reel crank has a handle on both ends of the crank: one end with a large radius and one end with a small radius.

The large radius arm is for POWER + the small radius arm is for SPEED (a wrist retrieve.) To explain dynamics of the reels operation please note the following example.

The POWER (end of the crank allows the fisherman to exert the same amount of power on the crank as the weight of the fish.

The SPEED (end of the crank allows the fisherman to pick up line with a fast wrist retrieve. However, if the fisherman used the SPEED end of the crank to crank - in a fish the fisherman would have to power equal to 3 times the weight of the fish.