Vintage Martin #3 automatic reel, 1923-39, cleaned, lubed, applied graphic, box

Description

Offered for auction: A vintage Martin #3 automatic fishing reel with applied trout graphic and presentation box. The reel has a 1923 patent date, so it was manufactured 1923-1939.
This reel has been disassembled, cleaned, given a clear-coat paint job and it has an applied trout graphic secured with several coats of clear lacquer. It has been lightly lubricated with waterproof bicycle bearing grease, reassembled and adjusted; the leather spool-brake pad has also been adjusted.
The reel is in excellent operating condition and works as smoothly as silk. Included is a presentation box made from a cigar box (see the last two pictures).
This is a one-of-a-kind reel that should serve you well for many years - buy it with confidence.
If you are a reel collector, it will
certainly liven up your reel shelves!
The reel has a drag-release attachment on the rewind lever, so a fish can be played by hand, with only the rewind tension applied to the spool. This feature of the reel automatically takes up slack line when a fish you are playing runs towards you. There is also a rewind-spring-release knob on the spring disk that free-spools the line, so, if you like to play a fish with a pile of line accumulating at your feet or streaming downstream from you in the river, you may. Of course, automatic reels were developed by Martin and other companies in the late 1800s to avoid just this problem.
Martin offered this reel model for steelhead, larger bass and muskelunge fishing. If you fish with vintage fly line and, perhaps, a bamboo rod, the reel's spool will hold about 150' of “G” line. If you use modern fly line, the spool will hold about 90' of commonly available floating line. It weighs 8.2 ounces, about the same as a more modern Martin Fly-Wate "tuna can" auto reel (#37/38 and 47/48).
Martin reels are way over-built and, if you clean and lubricate it once in a while, this reel will probably last another 90 years. The leather spool brake has been checked and holds well, even when the rewind spring has been wound up tightly. Martin rewind springs cannot be over-wound by a big fish on a long run because all Martin reels have an automatic spring-tension release mechanism built into the line spool. As with any automatic reel, one CAN break the reel's rewind spring by over-winding it by hand or by letting the spool rewind way too fast as the end of the line returns to the reel or by rewinding way too fast with an empty spool.
From time to time I will offer other Martin reels with similar applied trout graphics, so please keep an eye on my listings at:
https://www.ebay.com/sch/holl-1832/m.html
This reel would make an excellent Christmas gift.