Some very exciting news - I now grease my line rollers. Your day is now a whole lot better.

Nobody could ever accuse us anglers of being a bit nerdy at times, so here’s a blog post about how I have slightly changed the maintenance of the line rollers on my spinning reels which are used for my bass fishing. If you go back to a blog post I wrote last year about how I look after my spinning reels, I am still doing things the same way here save for the fact that I now pack my line rollers with grease instead of oil. It came about via me fishing with and absolutely loving this little Shimano Stradic 2500HG-FL spinning reel, but noticing pretty quickly that there seemed to be something a bit different about the line roller assembly - it’s the bit where your braid slots into when you retrieve, as per below - and that as stunning as these new Stradic FL reels are, I was having to oil the line roller a bit too frequently because it was sounding a bit raspy on the retrieve.

So as per this blog post here, I thought why the hell not pack the whole line roller with grease and see how it goes. You can trawl through YouTube and find loads of really exciting videos on spinning reel maintenance, and I can almost guarantee you that every single video is telling you to do things a slightly different way. Don’t put oil in so and so bearings, leave the line roller alone, do or do not wash the reel down after use, don’t touch that bit, do touch this bit, and so on. I am always looking out for ways in which I can improve my overall fishing, but when it comes to looking after my spinning reels I have come around to a way of doing things over a long time now which works well for me. By no means am I saying that what I do to my spinning reels are the right things to do, but the advice out there is conflicting at best, and at least with me I am out there a lot and my gear tends to get a hammering. A part of me does like to think that perhaps I am doing something right on the spinning reel maintenance side of things though, because my beloved little Shimano Twin Power XD C3000HG reel is still as smooth as it was on day one after three+ years of fishing with it, this quite frankly amazing little Shimano Stradic 2500HG-FL spinning reel is arguably even smoother after a year+ of use, and I have taken a particular delight in winding my Penn Slammer III 3500 reel underwater whenever possible - and it keeps on getting smoother and smoother the more grief I give it.

But I do look after my gear. Rods and reels are hosed down after fishing (I tighten the drag of the reel right down before doing this), and when my Slammer takes a proper dunking I will take it off the rod, tighten down the drag, immerse it in a sink full of warm water, turn the handle multiple times, take the reel out, slacken the drag off, and leave it to drip dry. If we take a regular lure fishing session though where a reel isn’t spending time underwater or getting splashed repeatedly by saltwater, it makes sense to me that the one area which is subject to most saltwater getting in and killing things is the line roller assembly. Think about retrieving your lure and how wet braid is coming down through the guides on your rod under a degree of tension, and then have a close look at how saltwater is literally spitting around the line roller as it goes back onto the spool. The same with line coming off the spool in the cast, as per above. Daiwa can claim all they like about their Mag Seal technology protecting the line roller assembly but I don’t believe a word of it, and I can’t find out for sure if even on a sealed reel such a Van Staal whether the line roller is 100% sealed. Nope, saltwater is getting in there on most if not all spinning reels is my thinking, and I want to do what I can to protect things and stop my braid getting trashed by a badly running line roller etc.

Oiling up the different line rollers on a fairly regular basis was working just fine until the little Shimano Stradic 2500HG-FL came along and for some reason seemed to get rid of the oil a bit faster and then sound a bit rough around the line roller until I oiled it up again. I can’t see any point in not using the rather excellent Penn Precision Reel Oil and Penn Precision Reel Grease for my spinning reels, and I thought why the hell not start packing out the line roller assembly with grease instead of oil. Straight away it went and sorted out the Shimano Stradic 2500HG-FL for me, so I got to thinking why not do the same thing on any other spinning reels I might fish with. So I did, and it works great on them as well, indeed I am having to re-grease any line roller assemblies far less frequently than I would have to re-oil them. My theory is that the line roller is turning under a degree of pressure and it doesn’t exactly need to be free-spinning for a week like a tournament casting reel, so surely the more “stay in place” lubrication based protection (grease) I can get in there the better.

You need to know that I am not technically minded at all, so this is some easy maintenance. I unscrew the line roller assembly as per above, then I carefully take out all the bits I can and place them down in order. Now I literally paint on plenty of this Penn Precision Reel Grease in and around all the different parts, screw the assembly back together, and then wipe off the excess grease which there will be because I make sure to overdo things in my quest to get everything covered up (at least it’s not superglue and jig heads and sticking fingers together!). I then use a piece of string to roll the line roller back and forth multiple times as I think this helps almost bed the grease into the bearing or the bush or whatever is in the line roller assembly. I might need to wipe off a little bit more excess grease after this, but now the reel is ready to go fishing again and I don’t do anything else to this part of the reel until it feels or sounds a bit raspy. How about that for a wet and windy Wednesday morning? Are we not entertained?

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