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A Tribute to an Original : Saltiga-Z turns 20







Back in 2019 I went on a mission to salvage and consolidate my huge electronic archive of fishing related files, which goes back to the beginnings of my use of the internet in 1996. Those files were scattered on all sorts of ancient storage mediums, and I wanted to save them before a time comes when I can no longer find the readers/cables/drives required to access those storage devices.

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2001 Daiwa Saltiga-Z Turns 20 - AlanHawk.com.

I had an old Toshiba laptop, which basically weighs more than my house, whose CD ROM still worked. I then dug up a tin box that connected my 3.5" HDD and 5.25" Quantum Bigfoot drive to a USB link, ordered a converter cable for a couple of 2.5" IDE laptop drives, and even borrowed an external floppy disk drive from my ex to see what's stored in those antiquated 1.4 MB "diskettes" as we used to call them back then. Well, not sure if I can really call it borrowing since two years on I still haven't returned the drive to her, so I might just admit that I stole it. Thanks to my legendary laziness I keep taking the poor woman's things and rarely return any, but I take her to a nice lunch every now and then so my theft is cancelled out... I guess? I digress though.

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After days of navigating "bad sectors" and fossilised computer viruses, I managed to recover many gigabytes of files, then sat down to comb through them. Thousands of reel pictures in various stages of disassembly, pages of specifications, screenshots from tackle websites, old catalogues of brands some of which are now defunct, fishing clips, and I even found scans of several 1970s Norwegian adult magazines which I must have moved to the fishing folder by mistake 23 years ago and been looking for since. Clicking through the pages I couldn't help but wonder if Scandinavia suffered a severe shortage in razors 50 years ago. I mean granted it's all blonde fluffy stuff, still there is such a thing as too much fluff if you get my drift. But I digress again...

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Then I found it. A file that I saved in August 2001 then completely forgot about it when 9/11 happened a month later, and myself - and the whole world - became preoccupied with more serious matters than hobbies and sports. That file was a promotional video that Daiwa released to welcome the Saltiga-Z series into our world, and watching it 18 years later on that cold 2019 morning transitioned me into a state of happy nostalgic reminiscence as I relived the events from almost two decades prior...

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2001 Daiwa Saltiga-Z Turns 20 - AlanHawk.com.

It all began when Japanese anglers who frequented an old bulletin board, which I used to post on, spoke about a video they saw on Daiwa's Japanese site, Daiwa Seiko as it was known at the time. I don't recall if that video was on Daiwa's domain or linked from it, but I navigated my way to it anyway. Unfortunately though in those days watching a video wasn't as simple as pulling your phone and sailing at the eye-watering 5G speeds you have today. I had no idea how big that video was, but I knew it was way too big since my first attempts to stream it on the 28k dialup internet I had at home turned into hours of staring at frozen images in a perpetual state of buffering.

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Not one to give up on juicy new tackle, I walked to a mate's house who had one of those super fast 56k modems. Sadly though the phone lines themselves weren't capable of matching that speed and we were only getting 1.2 kb/s at most, barely faster than what I was getting at home. That would've meant perhaps a whole day of buffering and a phone bill large enough to get my mate's parents divorced and him thrown out in the woods to eat grass and dead amphibians, so to spare him that fate I took the train to a seedy neighbourhood near St. Pancras where a cheap internet cafe I knew opened late. It was the kind of place where it was common to hear the person next to you making a VOIP call to someone in America telling them that the boxes of gold will be shipped once they receive the clearance fee via Western Union, and staring at those lovely blokes for 2 seconds was all it took to get you stabbed once you walked out of the door. Next time you hear someone saying that he's passionate about fishing gear, just ask him if he's passionate enough to walk into a dimly lit den surrounded by knife-wielding fake princess and oil tycoons just to check the latest Japanese spinner.

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Anyhow, I paid the 2 quid and got the code for the 1 hour of use, sat in front of the huge tower computer, cleared the cache and history of the "Netscape Navigator" not to be falsely accused of whatever the previous user was doing, then with headphones in my ears I streamed the video. Nine minutes later I was sitting there silently, pretty sure that I'd just watched the dictionary definition of  a "gamechanger". I knew I had to save that video so I could study it and show it to others. We didn't have the luxury of browser extensions that save streams back then, yet in those early days of the internet page designs were simple and a quick look at the HTML code was all it took me to locate the source video file. Saved it on that machine, then gave the manager a fiver to have it burned on a CD and took it home.

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Fast forward to when I rediscovered that video in 2019, I scanned the web to see if it had been out there for all to enjoy, but to the best of my ability I was unable to find it. I decided then that I would show you the video one day when a good chance comes by, and today is as good a chance as ever as I mark 20 years of the Saltiga-Z and feature the video as the centrepiece of this anniversary article. Before you watch it, let me quickly go over some technical details and explain certain choices I made.

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2001 Daiwa Saltiga-Z Turns 20 - AlanHawk.com.

Looking at this 20 years old file on my computer today makes it clear that it couldn't be published as is. Firstly because it's 105 megabytes in size, which is still too big for readers in many parts of the world where bandwidth is limited and expensive, and secondly because the file is an asf. Asf is an old audio/video container that's incompatible with most modern systems, and it contains a video coded in pre-standard Microsoft MPEG-4 V3, also outdated and would not work on most devices. I did some video editing and re-encoded it in H.264 for maximum compatibility, taking its size down to less than 40% of the original size in the process. The frame dimensions are 316 x 236 pixels, which was huge in 2001 when the most common display resolution was 640 x 480, and after a lot of tinkering I decided to leave these dimensions alone. I had tried to upscale it, but didn't like the fidelity of the result to the original video. Detail was lost and edges were smoothed out, possibly due to the analog origin of the video with its unique artefacts that my encoders couldn't deal with. I found that it's better to leave it in the original dimensions and let your hardware do the enlargement job when you go full screen.

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Without further ado, here is the video, which is in Japanese but remains easily understood thanks to some English words

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Back then, just like now, my engineering background worked as a B.S. detector that went off whenever someone made unscientific claims about a design or misrepresented/exaggerated the benefit of a feature. That detector remained as calm as a sleeping kitten for the duration of the video. I observed in utter wonderment how the Saltiga-Z featured an unprecedented assemblage of advanced engineering, manufacturing, and metallurgical principles, most of which existed in other applications but never before compiled in a spinning reel. I'll highlight some of these with captures from the video, but before we even get to the contents the video itself deserves a nod for breaking new grounds....

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2001 Daiwa Saltiga-Z Turns 20 - AlanHawk.com.

That was a film of high production values where crews of fishermen were filmed for months, cinematic camera angles and techniques were employed for maximum effect, animations created to interweave with live-action scenes, and music composed and edited to match the mood of the shots. Some of the techniques might feel familiar nowadays, but back in 2001 the hairs on my arms stood at 8:25 when the image froze and transitioned into studio shots of the reel as dramatic music played, just to name one example of the powerful techniques employed in this production. With this video Daiwa was ushering in a new era in which high-end fishing reels were being elevated to the level of luxury cars and Swiss watches in terms of advertising budget and promotional extravaganza. Actually shots of the raging ocean in this video reminded me of an old Rolex commercial that I watched in college, which sent me running to buy my first Submariner. Before the Saltiga we only got pictures and specifications' charts, after the Saltiga reels were coming with what essentially are full fledged film trailers.

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Another interesting fact about the video can be deduced from both its size and the lack of an English-dubbed version. In Japan everyone could stream a 105 megabytes video because they were way ahead of the West in connectivity, with ISDN 128 being quite common in households over there, while dial-up still reigned supreme on our end outside of commercial entities and universities, etc. There was no point in dubbing it since most homes in the West lacked the capability to watch it.

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2001 Daiwa Saltiga-Z Turns 20 - AlanHawk.com.

Those coils of bright yellow line were an unfamiliar sight for many anglers. Braid was common in Japan yet it was still making its way into our collective consciousness here with a lot of confusion and many heated debates centring around braid vs mono, mostly derailed by ignorance and monetary interest. Possibly one of my very first online discussions of fishing was in 1999 when I told people in a chatroom that braid could cut into traditional rod guides and that hard guides were needed to get its full potential, but one of the "experts" of those days swore that it's a myth leading to a rowdy exchange that ended with me being banned. I'll need to involve my toes to count the number of fishing groups I was banned from over the years. I'm probably the most banned thing ever, likely beating that Cannibal Holocaust movie by a couple of bans. Look, though, just how far we've gone. Took us - you and myself - a couple of decades of teamwork but we managed to push the sponsored nonsense written/said by paid "reviewers" into complete irrelevancy. But I digress once more...

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2001 Daiwa Saltiga-Z Turns 20 - AlanHawk.com.

The Saltiga-Z was only the second spinning reel ever to be actually fully sealed, and the first ambidextrous reel with a complex structure to be so. Seals of all shapes and types were placed at even the smallest possible entry point, including the line roller itself. Initially, the importance of sealing a boat reel wasn't exactly appreciated, but with this new breed of heavy duty spinners taking on bigger jobs, including long range trips where the reels got sprayed with saltwater for days on end, people slowly came around to valuing this new feature. The sealing of the Saltiga-Z was relatively balanced to secure waterproofing without creating too much tightness in the action. Daiwa's ardent competitor, Shimano, was still many years away from catching up with its first fully sealed reel.

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2001 Daiwa Saltiga-Z Turns 20 - AlanHawk.com.

Ridiculous marketing name aside, that was another industry first that later steered other brands into the same direction. Instead of the traditional face hobbing previousl;y used to cut a drive gear, Daiwa invested heavily in 3D computer modelling systems to design and manufacture a gear whose every surface and curvature is crafted to maximise the contact area with the pinion, and reduce sliding in favour of increased rolling. By maximising contact surface, the load is spread across a larger area for a net gain in strength, and the reduction of sliding both increases efficiency (power transmission) and decreases wear. Prior to that, strength could only be achieved by adopting stronger - and heavier/noisier - alloys such as stainless steel. The alloy Daiwa used for this new gear was C6191 aluminium-bronze which was light, ran quietly, didn't corrode easily, and had wear-resisting hardness so high it forced the factory to renew the cutters more frequently than at any time prior. 20 years on, Saltiga-Z reels are being retired by most owners who actively fish them, but it's seldom due to worn gearing. Instead it's largely other parts that wear out and spares can no longer be found, but the gearing remains tight in the vast majority of these retired reels. 

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2001 Daiwa Saltiga-Z Turns 20 - AlanHawk.com.

The golden rule that one shouldn't use a spinning reel to crank heavy loads still stood, yet the introduction of braid with its low stretch opened the door for techniques such as deep jigging, where one has no option but to reel against the resistance of the heavy jiggs deep down. Daiwa adapted to that by integrating this "minimum offset gear" in the new Z, which to me remains one of the all time greatest features in a spinning reel. Ideally, the highest gearing efficiency would be achieved by a drive gear that's perfectly inline with the pinion, but that scenario isn't possible in an ambidextrous reel due to the gear shaft extending all the way to the other side of the gearbox, so the drive gear has to shift from that theoretical optimum position. Daiwa studied this phenomenon and decided to make that shift in gear's position (offset) as small as possible, mainly by using a thin male gear shaft that allowed the drive gear to come down closer to the pinion to salvage the greatest degree of efficiency possible in this scenario. Back then my main reel was Daiwa's previous flagship, the Team Daiwa TDX HIA 6000, whose gear had a thick female shaft to receive the sliding hexagonal handle shaft, and when I compared it next to the Saltiga-Z on the water I was blown away by the additional cranking power the Z produced.

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2001 Daiwa Saltiga-Z Turns 20 - AlanHawk.com.

That is what's more commonly known as a "floating shaft", where the main shaft has no direct contact with the inside of the pinion to reduce energy losses due to friction. That setup existed prior to the Saltiga-Z so it's not breaking new grounds here, but the Z perfected the existing system by including an extra flotation bushing in the mid-post for greater shaft stability at both ends of the pinion. Guess how long it took Shimano to finally acknowledge the benefit of that design?

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2001 Daiwa Saltiga-Z Turns 20 - AlanHawk.com.

This image is from Shimano's 2019 introduction of that second flotation bushing, which they called "InfinityDrive".

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2001 Daiwa Saltiga-Z Turns 20 - AlanHawk.com.

And here is that same bushing from Daiwa's 2001 literature, beating its cheeky opponent by 18 long years.

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The Saltiga-Z had other great features that aren't included in this video, such as the emergency mechanical anti-reverse which Shimano picked up 7 years later, the oscillation block that rolled on a ball bearing for smoothness under heavy loads, the hidden joint of the handle stem, etc. I'll keep it limited to the video though not to turn this into a second review of the Z.

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2001 Daiwa Saltiga-Z Turns 20 - AlanHawk.com.

The Saltiga-Z was a pioneering spinner and one of only a handful of historical milestones that changed the direction of the tackle industry, and while by no means a perfect reel, it laid the foundation to a dynasty that evolved for two decades until it delivered what I consider to be the only perfect reel ever made; the fourth generation Saltiga of last year. And as I continue to be awestruck and mystified by the preeminence of that 4th generation, I never forget that it all started with a nifty sliver/blue reel that back in 2001 cost more than a decent used car and whose image occupied my computer's background for years; the one and only Z.

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2001 Daiwa Saltiga-Z Turns 20 - AlanHawk.com.

That's all for now. I'll post a Christmas message and a roadmap for 2022 in a few days, meanwhile keep watching the News page for any updates. I'll get going now because this article reminded me that I need to closely study.... hmmm how do I put it?... yeah, some old Nordic publications in the field of human anatomy...

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Cheers


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Alan Hawk

December, 7th, 2021




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