I bought one off Ebay recently for 99p! It didn't work too well and you can see why:
Here are the guts once given a good clean:
You can see why they have a reputation for giving up the ghost under pressure. The small "shoe" on the bottom left follows the groove in the main gear to give the spool oscillation.
Here's the reel ready for closing up.
Make sure that the groove in the main gear is well packed with grease to avoid any notchiness when the shoe crosses the "junction". To postion the shoe in the groove pull or push on the spindle until it drops into place. The anti reverse mechanism is difficult to take apart so I just flushed it with parafin to clear out any grit and old grease.
Next I stripped out the bail arm assembly:
I'd actually replaced the main spring mechanism when I took this picture. The main challenge with this is to get the line roller working properly. To do this you need to bend the bail arm so that there is no tension in it when reassembled and the roller goes squarely into the main spring arm. Each end of the wire should just drop into place without needing any pushing. I used molybdenum grease under the roller. You can also just see 2 tab washers in the lower part of the picture one of these was in place to stop the nut on the end of the bail arm coming undone and I found the other in the the gap between the flier and the reel body! The tab on the washer, if in place will need to be bent open to remove the nut and bent back up one the bail arm is reassembled.
Here's everything back in place and working nicely:
This was a real nostalgia trip for me as I used to own the later version of this reel in the 70s. This earlier version (1962?) has the rather unusual 3 position anti reverse mechanism. It gives anti reverse with click, reverse without click and a centre pin-like reverse with click which might come in useful for a bit of carp or barbel fishing.
The bail arm can be released manually on this reel by pressing in the spring loaded latch. As GOS says, some interesting innovations. I can't understand why the many variations though as all the parts are die cast and the tooling costs to make new dies would have been considerable.
Quot homines, tot sententiae.