(Yep, I like em soft) I fish more salt than fresh but I can get away with a freshwater reel with diligent maintenance, since click reels have no hidden parts. I've been a Medalist fan for many years-I have the new one in 5w and two older ones I have used up til now. The 1595 1/2 is a lovely reel, very well engineered. It will hold a DT 9 line and 100 yards of 20# backing, for those of you who aren't sure from the specs listed on Pfleuger's site. Now, you could buy a more expensive reel, but at this size, you're looking at $300 or more. If your ego needs this, by all menas, buy a bar-stock reel. FS Pflueger Medalist 1595 1/2 RC fly fishing spool $40 - (near Sunset High School). Bamboo, Fiberglass & Classic Reels; Replies 4 Views 2K.

1. Pflueger Medalist 1594 Rc Fly Reel

An Angler's Guide To The Classic Pflueger Medalist

Part One - 1930 to 1958

Article and Photographs by Joe Cornwall

I've been a Pflueger Medalist fly reel fan for as long as I've been able to hold a fly rod. A Medalist was my first fly reel, purchased for me by my grandfather all those many years ago. It was a 1494DA and I still have it. Since those early days I've gone on to fish Medalists in fresh water and salt and in every size from the petite 1492 to the hefty 1498. Along the way I've learned a lot about the personality of this iconic piece of gear. It's a simple design, capable of performance far beyond that which its modest parts would suggest.

As popular as the Medalist is for fishermen and collectors alike, one would think that getting accurate and detailed information about servicing and maintaining this reel would be an easy click away. Over the years I've found that there is some great information on the Internet about this and other classic reels, but there isn't one place where it's all been brought together. Until now. In this series of articles we'll explore the history and evolution of the Pflueger Medalist. We'll look at variations in construction from the earliest models to the present. We'll compare and contrast the in-hand performance of vintage and contemporary versions and examine line-size applications and capacity. We'll see what makes them tick and we'll explore, in detail, what needs to be done to convert a reel from right-hand-wind to left-hand-wind and to keep it running for years to come.

Pflueger has a long and interesting history. In 1881, Earnest Pflueger established the Enterprise Manufacturing Company in Akron, Ohio, with the goal of producing and distributing hooks, lures and fishing tackle. Earnest enlisted the help of his brothers Joe, William and and Charles and, over the next several decades, the family founded a strong business, primarily as a manufacturer of fishing hooks. By 1916 Earnest A. Pflueger, son of the founding Pflueger, would take over the family business, rename it, and build it into the dominant and diversified American fishing tackle company which it would remain for the next half century.

The Pflueger company applied for a patent for a fly reel design in October 1928 and was granted the patent in September of 1930. The patent was filed by Charles Pflueger and was for ornamental decoration of a fly reel design — the iconic round line guard and other elements. The Medalist name made its debut in the Pflueger 1931 catalog, but it would be a few more years before the reel would take on the characteristics that would come to define the recognized Medalist with adjustable drag topology. It wasn't until 1938 that the adjustable drag was added. Prior to the award of this patent, the earliest Medalists featured a click-pawl drag and a 'cage' spool arbor. These early reels are prized collector items and sell for amounts that really preclude their consideration as ordinary fishing reels.

These early reels were available in three sizes; small, medium and large. We now know them as the 1492, 1494 and 1496 respectively. All featured the now classic round line guard and were designed as right-hand-wind reels. Several generations ago almost all fishing reels were right-hand-wind; it wasn't until the spinning reel exploded on the scene after World War II that using the left hand to crank the handle became fashionable. Because there were left handed anglers in the market, there was a series of reels made that were left-hand-wind. Of course these sold in minute quantities, proportional to the percentage of lefty's in the general population. These reels were known as the 1392, 1394 and 1396 and are currently so rare (and expensive when they do come to market) that they are of no concern to the angler or casual collector. There also was a series of Medalists that were, for lack of a better term, 'ambidextrous' They didn't have the round line guard at all. They were the 1592, 1594 and 1596. In an interesting aside, the 15xx model numbers would be revisited in the 1990's when Pflueger released a modification of the Medalist design that featured a palming rim on the spool. The new reels are essentially drag-enabled 14xx series reels with a different (and completely interchangeable) spool and bear no functional relationship to these very early click-and-pawl designs.

Pflueger Medalist 1594 Rc Fly Reel

Of the click-pawl reels, only the tiny 1492 and its wide-body brother the 1492½ remain in circulation in sufficient numbers to be readily available. They are also currently manufactured and available as new. There are a number of minor variances to all the Pflueger Medalist reels that were excellently documented by Richard Komar in his article Pflueger Medalist Reels - A History. Komar's article is a great resource to help identify the age of a particular Medalist permutation. Let's start this adventure by taking a closer look at a couple of the variations in the click-pawl line-up.