Huge South Bend Saltwater Spinning Reel

[drexelantiques]

I was looking over some of the reels in my collection this evening, and recalled an article in Brian McGrath's (sp?) old fishing collectibles magazines about the Glading South Bend museum, and some salt water spinning reels they showed in the article. Those reels had to be the biggest spinning reels I have ever seen, looked like they would handle 50 lb line.

I will look back and see if I can find the article, but I was wondering if those reels had ever actually been sold to the public?

If not, who made the biggest spinning reels? I have some of the largest Penn and Mitchell salt water spinning reels, and a couple of my Fin-nor reels are pretty good sized, but they looked to me like they would have been dwarfed by the South Bend reels in that article.