Feel of fishing reel

What kind of image will you have in mind when you hear about a fishing reel? The fishing reel is a simple device that releases and winds up a fishing line. In a world of hobbies, the demand for designability and functionality is enhanced when it comes to luxury goods. A representative example of functionality is the feeling experienced during rotation of the reel (i.e., feel of a fishing reel). The feeling is a vibration, and it occurs owing to gear-pair engagement when the handle of the reel rotates. The best professional anglers have said that they can feel if it is water turbidity or the behavior of a fish from the change in the feel of the fishing reel. To satisfy their demand, we must control the accuracy of the gear to the sub-micrometer level. For this purpose, the shape of the tooth flank of the gear is precisely designed by three-dimensional computer-aided design (3D-CAD). However, anglers' demands increase each year. To respond to these demands, in addition to improving the tooth flank accuracy, we need to research the feel of the fishing reel. Initially, we must think about what is the feel of a fishing reel. We contributed to the research of the relationship between the vibration and the tactile sensitivity of the human finger. As a result, we elucidated that tactile sensation has a high correlation with the vibration of mesh frequency that occurs owing to gear-pair engagement. Using this phenomenon, we succeeded in developing a new feature called "micro-module gear ^TM." This function improves the feel of the fishing reel by adapting a small gear module. This is a technology born from an entirely new approach to the optimization of the mesh frequency. However, research on gear and sensitivity is underdeveloped. In this paper, we report some state-of-the-art studies in this underdeveloped field that improved the feel of fishing reel.