Ed 12 Wozzat?

 What, you might quite rightly ask, is this contraption? Well, the second photo provides a bigger clue, and the third makes it clear.

 Sometimes (rarely, actually) I buy a new fly line because an old one has had it, and needs to be replaced. Perhaps the new line is to go onto a newly acquired reel? That’s straightforward, however, if you are like me, that newly purchased line might be the ‘latest thing’, or even a new addition to your armoury of lines. I can’t keep buying reels every time I buy a new line, or mission control will “want to talk about this”, so there usually follows a great deal of swapping lines, from and to, an assortment of reels, until the newest one is satisfactorily spooled and at the ready. The oldest, or maybe ‘least liked’ line ends up being stashed away, in reserve or to be passed on to someone, “it’s still got plenty of life left in it”.

 But, why is all this swapping around necessary you might wonder? Inevitably, your armoury of lines are all in different weights and densities, with the reels all different sizes and diameters too. Thus, you swap around until you are satisfied, although all the ‘improvement’ might mean something to only you. You could approach this a different way and buy a particular reel with a bunch of spare spools, but you would need to be able to identify which lines are on which spools, and anyway, doing that would be to suppress the tackle tart within, losing out on the sheer beauty and technical differential from manufacturer to manufacturer, model to model, in even a modest collection of reels.

 To the details then: The handle is from a Scierra Avalanche rod that one of my sons kindly snapped for me, (I confess that to date, I have personally snapped two others; I hope these things really do just come in threes!). I thought the handle and reel fitting looked cool, so I cut off the rest of the butt section. The reel attached to the cork with tape is an old, plastic Danica reel, dirt cheap, which came with three extra spools. The thick rubber washer which held the spool onto the reel chassis perished, but a piece of pipe cleaner now does the job instead. I simply wind line, under tension, (and backing if required), onto a spool and swop spools and reels back and forth until I’m happy with the changeovers. AND THERE IS NO LINE TWIST!