Tony - Tom Testa who started Reel Colors in Mass. years ago....Tom was a machinist with one of the aerospace outfits and was doing reels on the side. I had 7 or 8 old 80Ws that were near basket cases and saw an article about Tom in some mag....called him and he was just getting started. Quoted me $150 a reel to totally re-machine them, strip the original gold and re-anodize them platinum. So I sent the reels up to him and he was almost done and called me, "UV, you want these reels engraved?" "Huh, you can do that?" Yep he can, so this was pre-email so I drew the sketch of the sie plate and faxed it to him. He said he would put it in the computer cutting machine and send me a fax of how it came out.....well, back in my working days I was on the road for a week, get back to the office and there is this fax of the side plate engraving layout.....looked great until I looked closer...he had spelled Another Joy "Aother Joy"....Holy Crap!!! I called him and he answered on his cell phone pulling into the parking lot of the place that was gonna cut the engraving and anodize them with my reels in the back of his truck.....got it fixed in the nick of time. Still have his fax of the faux pas taped to my office door along with a number of unrelated other screw ups, both legal and boating. People at my office call it the "Door of Shame".
Tom does fantastic work, his web site is
www.reelcolors.com but he's way more than cosmetics. He took my old 80Ws down to the frames, machined out all the corrosion pits, took the tolerances dwon to 1/10,000 ths, you can see in the Prof's pix that he "releived" the countersink holes where the side plate screws go, a big deal to keep salt from building up around the heads of the screws. The reels came back to me 10 times better than new. He also makes some really nice flex handles for reels. I later sent him a 12/0 Finor that someone had anodized a crappy red and he took it down and did the platinum on it too, plus a custom "Another Joy" side plate. Tom says in his view the Internationals are way better than the Finors, mine was the first he had worked over...says all the parts are pretty much hand made, a pain to duplicate.
I'm real proud of them. A very good alternative to throwing out good but shabby reels and buying new. Plus, keep CX on them and the roller guides of your rods and they will last a few lifetimes.
UV