#Cardinal chains kongregrate level 55 series
There are is two things that stand out with the Black 50 series reels, the paint never fails and the internal metalwork is faultless, yes the spools have blown apart on the reels on the odd occasion and the trips wear out but in all fairness they are serviceable parts, with my set of three 55's I had 12 extra spools with various breaking strain lines on them, I did have a spool go on me once but never had the trip problem. Even though its rare its definatley not for me, I will stick with my 55's
You will notice the reel is based on the 154, its silver writings on the decal and of course its not ambidextrous but look a bit harder at the rotor, no longer is the spool skirted but rides inside the rotor. So this is the range of reels in the 50 series, in 1981 a silent A/R was added to the Garcia reels but other than that they remained the same.Ību did experiment with a 3 series reel in the shape of the 354 and 355, very rare reels to find today, I was fortunate to get the 354 from Marco Malevasi, the editor of the ABU CARDINAL BOOK. Last but not least came the large Cardinal 57 The Cardinal 55 was simply a wonderful reel for the specimen angler The smallest reel in the series was the Cardinal 52 There were many "spin-offs" of the 50 series reels mainly sold to America, Zebco had a range of reels better know as the 554, 555 and the 557 which were also painted a different color, a khaki brown color with the usual black rotor, black and gold decals and red and black drag knobs, there was also the same European reels but with Garcia in red on the decal.īelow is some of the reels I have in my collection and I still have a set of 55,s I use today, they are the remains of my Carp fishing days and will remain here just incase I go back to it. Times were becoming hard for Abu and most of their ranges of reels that were far superior than most of the competition started to fade away and cheaper plastic rubbish was made that lost all its engineering qualities. Sadly the period of such a successful reel was very short lived, 4 years in total, 1978-82. The spools had writings on them and on the 15 series they were silver as were the declas on the sides of the housing, on the original 50 series all the writings were done in gold One of the beauties of these reels is its totally ambidextrous, just un-wind the small round locking button on the handle and swap sides, at the time a simple cost effective way of having left and right hand wind reels.Īnother series of similar reels but made a lot cheaper was the 152,154,155 and the 157, these were solely right hand wind reels and not ambidextrous. If Abu made one reel where the sales were very big it was the Cardinal 55 and in the fleet they also had a ultralite reel in the shape of the 52, a slightly bigger reel with the 54 and the Pike and Salmon reel the 57. This reel took the specimen reel world by storm and anyone who was a serious Carp fishermen at the time would of had at least one set of them in his armory. In the late 1970's ABU made what had become a seriously collectible and Iconic fishing reel in the shape of the Cardinal 55.
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