A very sad day indeed I am sure a great many of us will have good memories of catching tailor etc. from the beaches using an Alvey.

Alvey reel, Rangoon cane rod, strips of mullet for bait and and king brown bottles to slack the thirst on a secret beach somewhere now that was the way to have a most enjoyable evening.

It is sadly missed.

I grew up fishing with Alveys as a kid.  

For their time they were a great product - robust, reliable, easy to use.  Unfortunately times move on and I just don't think they are competitive as a reel option anymore.

 Fishing equipment manufacture competition is huge now days. I have fished with Alvey reels for forty years and enjoyed many elements of using the reels. Alvey have inavated across so many decades.

It has been the last ten years where spinner reels and overhead reels have taken full advantage of modern materials and design that have enticed the last of the fishos across from Alvey products.Braid used from the shore has been an area the Alvey never really handled at all.

So another page in history turns. 

 Bugger, sign of the times I guess. The old 651C5 will go down as one of the best beach fishing reel ever.

Product of their own success I think. How many here are fishing with one that is more than 20 years old?
I don't think one of mine is younger than me and my favourite was handed down from my grandfather along with the rod that was built for his father. I assured him I would take it out for a stretch every now and then.

Happy to say I have one that will always go out on the boat (as long as it keeps working) yeah so "always".

Mine is attached to a 1m rod (cut off above the first guide with hacksaw) has 200lb mono on it and is used pretty well every single fishing trip out!

 not good to hear that such a reliable reel is going . we have 5 of them for on the boat up to the reef queen . bloody solid reels. thats gotta be their downfall, they were made not to break unlike many other reel brands. 

Very sad indeed an awesome reel. I'm going to have to find mine have no idea where it is. It was old when I got it second hand for a bargain pretty sure the spool on mine is wood.

I loved mine as a teenager. Doubled as a great place for hiding my bag of weed when the old man took me camping.

 And cast a mile, sometimes over the fish!!  Well used in dry casting as well.

Going 20 years?! the old mans boat one has been going 40!

My Uncle was one of the original Steep Point, Cray Fish ,False Entrance fisherman, Dad caught a 99lb Sailfish off Steep in 1979 on a wooden shallow spool Alvey. The photo was in Campbell's Tackle cabinet for years. I still fish the same rod and 651C5 off the cliffs now that I first used in the early 80s as a kid and these reels where second hand when given to me. Dad and Uncle Norm will be heading to the Shark Bay cliffs again this year most probably the last of 50 odd years of annual trips. Two of the original crew have now passed and one of them John Duffield would test the new Alvey products I was extremely lucky to experience this and have memories of numerous captures. New fishing reels will come and go but they can't winch a 5kg Pinky or Baldy up a 10-20m cliff face. My boy is 10 now, bout time I teach him to cast an Alvey and pass on the tradition.

 I still have one of the old 9 inch deep dish Rosewood Alveys, I have 900m of 15kg pretest on it and 5 other Alveys so I am going to buy up some springs etc before they are no longer available.

BTW I have been spooled twice by BIG  fish at night with that reel, when there are only a few wraps of line left on the spool and the fish is still chugging out to sea you just clamp down on the spool and hope it pops at the swivel not the rod tip, both have happened to me , once at Steep point in 1981 and it popped at the rod tip so no more fishing with that for a 2 week trip another time at Sandy cape , something picked up my dead mullet and swam out to sea, it did not even slow down with a full drag and palming the reel, luckily that one popped at the knot .

i have another 9 incher that is loaded with 24kg mono that hooks onto a custom 9 wrap rod with a harness ring on it for pulling big reef fish up the cliffs around Shark bay.

yes I still have an old Alvey my dad bought second hand way back in 1976.

cheers Brendan , MAV.

Gee, didn't see that coming, been using alveys since I was knee high to a grass hopper all along the coast along the Ocean Road in Vic. Still have maybe half a dozen stoered in the shed back home.

 Alvey was the geat survivor of Australian reel manufacturers after all the other Australian makers ceased to exist.

From the 1930's to the 1960's there were around 100 Australian reel makers ranging from small backyard workshops through to the big guys such as Crouch, Surfmaster, Alvey etc.

Alvey outlasted them all by providing a quality product, great service and building a loyal following particularly in its home state of Queensland.

Cheap imports have obviously eaten away and finally made the business unviable.

Sad to see such an iconic brand and a national treasure close. 

 I still have 4 Alvey reels, the oldest a Rosewood Palmburner. Who remembers them?

Better buy a few drag washer sets, as all of mine are the same.

Sad to see, but a dying artform for sure.

Stax

____________________________________________________________________________

 

Mark Stevens

Senior Sales Consultant

 

T: +61 404045106      E: mark@futuresolarwa.com.au 

34/244 Beringarra Avenue, Malaga, Western Australia  6090

By all accounts it is a damn frenzy over east and stock / parts nearly gone already.

Cheers,

D80 

 Dodgy

Quite some years back I played around with an Alvey 925 with the idea of turning it into a down rigger using a windscreen wiper motor. At that point of time trying to get a suitable reduction gearbox proved to be the down fall of the project. A windscreen wiper motor would turn the reel no problem, however when you put 10lb (or 5kg) on the end of some steel wire it didn't want to play the game.

Now this was when fishing in about 30 to 50 fathoms was considered to be reaching into the dark deep really deep depths, now phffft those depths are considered shallow.
How times have changed, yesterday it was the moon, tomorrow it's Mars.

 Australia... if there was ever a time to stand up and be proud, now is the time! We cannot believe the volume of orders flooding in from retailers around the country as a result of your incredible loyalty towards our Aussie made Alvey Reels. Thank you!

For your benefit, we wish to advise that order levels are currently unprecedented and thank you all for your amazing support. This influx of sales has however cleaned out the physical 'stock on hand' and we are running the factory flat out to fill these orders!  At this stage many orders may take a few weeks to reach your retailer so please go easy on them, it's beyond the retailers control. 

We also want to advise that in its 'current form' Alvey Reels Australia cannot continue indefinitely but we are looking at all options moving forward. Thank you again for your wonderful support and we will do our utmost to supply your order requests.

Thank you,
Bruce Alvey

 This was for a mate. Turns out I come back from my trip needing the exact same art. Emailed last night, reply this morning, transaction set up. Excellent service. Surely something can be salvaged from this, such an excellent product, the durability of which is probably aa lot of the problem. I still have ALL my old Alveys, the original wooden spooled 600 which I saved up to buy to go with the rangoon cane rod I had been gifted, and my "new" 650C1, with  the luxury of a drag And I reckon the old 4" kids reel is still about, too. As well as the Reeefmasters from my pro days. perhaps, if the entire product range cannot be sustained, pare it back to just a few, on a reduced scale of production, and supply a core market?  Spares will always be in demand, too. I think of the example of Norton, the motorcycle manufacturer--when they went under in the late 70's, someone bought the rights to manufacture spares, and they are still in business to this day, as Norvil, manufacturing a good range of original quality spares. Food for thought, surely.

 always a alvey at a garage sale , but i an going down to complete angler rockingham  to buy a 651c before they run out of stock