Cleaning of a JVH President #1 Reel

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Paul M
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Cleaning of a JVH President #1 Reel

Post by Paul M »

A few weeks ago I picked up an unmarked Julius Vom Hofe reel that Steve identified for me as a JVH President reel. It is size #1, with round nickel plated rims, shown below as found:

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A main feature of the President reel is that it easily taken apart into major sub-assemblies by simply unscrewing the pivot pin, revealing what must be more than a hundred years of old grease and grime.

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Armed with my new O.R.C.A cleaning bible,CLEANING, RESTORING AND REPAIRING OLD FISHING REELS
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I skimmed through the articles of interest that pertained to the materials in this particular type of reel and proceeded to clean it up. Because this is a delicate old reel, I took my time and would say the process took me 7 hours (elapsed time) from start to finish. Here are pictures and a couple of videos to show the major findings and steps taken, culminating in the satisfying results I obtained. I strongly recommend you buy this O.R.C.A. publication!

Parts before complete take-down and cleaning:

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Parts in a container about to be immersed in mineral spirits.

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A video showing parts at the start of a 30 minute duration mineral spirits bath. Look closely below the gear shown at the start of the video. See how some of the century-old grease is rapidly falling off. (The video is only slightly more entertaining than watching paint dry but I show this video to illustrate the immediate cleaning effect of the mineral spirits, which is quite "dramatic".)

http://youtu.be/UatHy8-Eg1s

Then after cleaning with cloth, toothbrush, toothpicks and elbow grease and after a rinse in fresh water, the parts were put into an ultrasonic cleaner using 50% vinegar solution, run for 30 minutes at 30 degrees C. A lot more gunk came off in this stage. Note that I created an inner container using tin foil. This helped keep the parts together and was intended to avoid scratching. In the end, the vibrations overpowered the tin foil and created holes in the bottom of my tin foil lining, but it did keep the parts from falling into the bottom of the main tub.

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This is the ultrasonic cleaner I obtained a few years ago via EB. It has a built-in timer and temperature control. The digital readouts show it is set for a temp of 30C but still a few degrees below that goal and the timer has 15 minutes and 39 seconds remaining.

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Nickel plated brass parts cleaned. Note that the spool had a few edge dings that I carefully tried to smooth out but I stopped far short of doing as much as could have been done in order to avoid risking further damage.

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Side plates in between several iterations of Simichrome polishing and oiling. The plate at the right has several prominent rough "bites" along the edges but those were hand made by the maker so left as they were, with no attempt to smooth them out.

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Realizing the gear assembly was still full of century-old grease I took a step back at trying again to dis-assemble it. I used the "ice cube trick" to help one stubborn screw release. The technique worked like a charm! A toothpick came in very handy to scrape the hardened grease from between the gear teeth, which helped a great deal in getting the reel to work smoothly (as shown at the end of this post).

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The rear plate has an interior crack but on the outer surface is appears only as a shallow dent, so I left it alone. (The cleaning and restoration guide does explain clearly how to fix this crack but I will leave it for now).

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From this viewing angle, the shallow dent on opposite side, mentioned above, starts near the on/off click switch and goes towards the top center. There is also a scratch in the plate that I chose not to buff out.

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I did get worried that I had ruined the hard rubber sideplates as they had lost the dark shade when they came out of the first few cleaning steps. However, using several iterations of Simichrome and applying oil, they came back close to the original shade. I think more time on the shelf is needed for the rubber to re-hydrate and to get closer to black. I wasn't sure whether or not to use mineral spirits and the vinegar solution to clean the rubber but I did that anyway and I think my end results are acceptable.

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A neat "find" was revealed when I finally got the gear assembly apart and cleaned the parts further. I discovered artisan marks that mate the gear cover to the side plate. I assume the "III" stands for 3 inch diameter side plate assembly.

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Post cleaning, polishing, oiling and re-assembly, the job is complete around 3:00 am! In the backgrond are some of the key tools used, including a variety of screwdrivers, a neat pocket knife very useful for working with "V" shaped screw channels found on old reels. (Yes, I know I should get proper screw drivers for this but YOLO!), a toothbrush, lots of paper towels and toothpicks, Simichrome and a clean old gym sock (not shown) used for polishing.

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The finished product from 3 angles, that looks a lot fresher to me than when I got it.
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Image. and the bonus is that it works great, too. Turn on the sound for the final video:

http://youtu.be/lG6EYrlc2Uo

Thanks to all the contributors for their articles in the O.R.C.A publication:CLEANING, RESTORING AND REPAIRING OLD FISHING REELS. You all helped me get great results with this old, precious reel.
Last edited by Paul M on Fri Jun 20, 2014 5:57 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Brian F.
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Re: Cleaning of a JVH President #1 Reel

Post by Brian F. »

Nice Job, Paul!
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john elder
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Re: Cleaning of a JVH President #1 Reel

Post by john elder »

ClapclapclapclAp! The first of many, Paul! Great job!
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Paul M
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Re: Cleaning of a JVH President #1 Reel

Post by Paul M »

Thank you. I forgot one detail which was that I used an old favorite metal polishing product called Nev'r Dull. It is a proprietary product available in retail stores that looks and smells like wads of dense cotton soaked in mineral spirits. You open the tin and tear off small bits of the damp wadding as needed and wipe away gunk from metal surfaces, then toss out the dirty wads instead of using a cloth soaked in runny/drippy mineral spirits from a bulk container. The product literature claims it does no damage to metal. The Nev'r Dull MSDS data sheet indicates it contains "Mineral Spirits – Petroleum Hydrocarbon". I used this after the vinegar solution bath and the "grippy" properties of this wadding product helped me take off some of the stubborn oxidization, without having to resort to steel wool, so I thought I would add this tip.
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