REVIEW: Daiwa’s Custom Project

Standing out from the crowd. We purposefully do it with plenty of our “things” in life. Customizing our cars, motorbikes, boats, gadgets, clothes. The list goes on. So why not our fishing gear?? Daiwa has started the ball rolling on a serious level and introduced the new Custom X Project parts for their Fishing reels.

In days gone by the ability to personalize or customize your favourite or older fishing reels has been a bit hard to do, with only a small selection of products available with limited range of colours, it was a bit hard to get excited about it. Enter Daiwa’s Custom Project parts.

There has been a lot of hype about these “pimping” parts so I thought I would take a look at what all the fuss was about.

So the basic idea is to be able to change out the following parts of your factory reels with some more colourful bits of bling, giving almost unlimited colour combinations to try.

Spin reels
–    Spool
–    Handle
–    Handle knob

Baitcasters
–    Handle
–    Handle knobs

The Custom Project spinning spools are only designed to fit “real four” reels, which includes Caldia, Luvius, Certate, TD sol, Gekkabijin etc.

But it looks like the handles and knobs will fit any screw on type handle.

You have a choice of 5 different coloured spools in sizes 2004 and 2508:
–    Green Gold
–    Silver Copper
–    Silver Blue
–    Black Orange
–    Silver Purple

5 different coloured spin handles in both 55m and 65mm:
–    Black
–    Blue
–    Lime
–    Purple
–    Orange

The 55mm is suited to the smaller reels 1500 – 3000 and the 65mm are for the bigger reels 3500 – 4000.

The same 5 colours are also available in the swept baitcaster handles.

There is a huge selection of handle knobs. The same 5 baseline colours are available in extra small, small, medium and large EVA knobs. Knob size is more of a personal choice and effectively you can put what ever size you want on your handles. The EVA  knobs are only suitable for spinning reels.

On the other hand the Zaion handle knobs are suitable for all baitcasters, and 1500 – 2500 size “real four” spinning reels. Confused?? Check out the Daiwa website for full details and associated pictures.
The Zaion knobs come in a few different cool colours compared to the rest of the Custom project gear too. Green apple, White, Majora, Matt Blue and Yellow.

With all these colours and different parts a seriously huge number of colour combinations can be had to really personalise your gear.

I decided to “pimp” two of my spin reels. A older 2004 Caldia and a newer 2510 Certate. As you can see from the pics they came up pretty good and totally different to anything you’ve probably seen before, and there lies the benefit and fun of the Custom Project parts.