TackleTour

I'll begin with I originally bought my amber orange pixy with the intent of making a pixilla and grabbing a blue diy spool to match my legend inshore bfs rod. So I ordered the tdz line guide and some 7.2 gears and then started looking for a diy spool with none to be had. Me being impatient as I am, this was unacceptable so I looked for alternatives. I see Ian and others making spacers to fit smaller spools in larger frames but very few have opened up the spool window to fit a larger spool.

This got me thinking for a bit (which never ends well) and the end result was I decided to do a neat little setup with the help of my friend Mike who is an excellent machinist that does some of my gunsmith work where tighter tolerances are required.

I know the alphas parts and side plate will fit the pixy so 33mm spool was the goal. I grabbed a blue cosugi works spool and Mike developed a 33mm cutter that indexed off of the pinion bearing to clearance the frame. A few minutes later I have this.



A 33mm spool in a pixy! Now I have all the alphas spool options available in a pixy frame!

Now I'm awaiting a new set of palm plate guts and I'll reassemble with more pics!

Wow! That's great work! And it took some good amount of planning.

I have not seen this before. We have the spacers going down in diameters (all sizes and variations), and some of us have shaved frames to fit oval line guides on Alphas.

But, but this is the first time I have seen such a frame modification on a Daiwa myself...

Looking forward to seeing the finished reel when done.

GCW

You are a brave man, and he must be a heck of a machinist!

Lovely. Will you let us know how it fishes and casts?

I did that with a T3 AIR to fit a 34mm SV spool. I did mine by hand. I bet a machinist would have made mine look better than me carving it put with a blade.

Man love the ingenuity!

Got everything back together...



Now to test against the alphas air later today. I'll do a review in the reels section.

What a great custom reel and backstory!

There is not another reel like it. Great to see it fully upgraded with the oval line guide upgrade.

The time and effort on the project was well-spent.

That is one excellent mod, congratulations!!

Reports? Updates?

In between the crazy amount of work travel I've been on, I've been playing with this setup with lures in the 2g range on up and it will slightly exceed (5 feet or so) the alphas air in distance with a 2g lure but the air spool is a bit easier to control at this weight. On heavier lures above 2g the cosugi wins by far and having nearly the same line capacity as the original pixy spool vs the air spool is nice. The spool fits like it was placed there from the factory and you get the small form factor and more refined feel of the pixy platform. I still need to call tackle trap and see where my new set plate is, for now I just filed down the stock one to fit the 33mm spool. Overall I love the conversion and plan on doing another with the 33mm alphas sv spool.

So for those interested in trying it here's what you need to do to make it work:

- clearance the frame with a 33mm cutter (if you want to send your frame to mike to cut it PM me for his info)
- a new set plate from an sv105 or you can file down the stock pixy one to work
- and for me I painted where the frame was clearanced so the magnesium was covered with paint.

Looks very professional.

Fantastic effort. A lovely project.

That is pretty epic.

Upgrade to a pixy r handle with i knobs and a swayback drag and your in!!!