WOW. Great thread.

boxed Mitchells are always a great score, and rods bent by fish a great presentation.
There's a nice step in quality between the 308 and 408, and the latter has been my recommendation to many friends for their cane UL's.
Good effort to improve your reel. (I always take photos going in to get me back out, and yours would make a great tutorial thread)

Pot-metal die-cast frames were the only way to make these reels for four decades. (Except for benchmade reels from machined barstock like Fin-Nor and Van Staal).
Light weight simply came from being small.
The first plastic frames flopped in the breeze for most of the '90s with a few exceptions (Penn). I had one of the Cardinal plastic Lew's in inshore size before my Penn 4x00SS, and it was a joke that didn't fish a season (I heard redfish at the other end of my line snickering) - even with a half-inch-tall spool, it couldn't get good loaded-line lay.
If you remember some of the graphite-filled plastic fly reels, they were worth entry into the ugly reel toss.

Sometime in there, they began blending a high content of ceramic glasses with thermosetting resins, and came up with some worthy structural plastics.
JW Young was banking on surviving the onslaught of offshore barstock manufacturing with modern molding technology, they made some absolutely great $100 fly reels using it, and no one would buy them.

Even today, you can't quite get the stiffness in high-tech plastics that you can get in thin-wall metal forgings (die-cast is right out), and vice-versa, the metal won't quite get you the light weight of the composite plastic. Whether Shimano's last-generation-plastic frame counts as classic is in the eye of the beholder. Some people aren't going to accept skirted spools as classic. Some aren't going to accept Japan. Others will always look away if it doesn't say Mitchell. But since we always give bonus points for smooth, the Shimano's are going to find their way in. You're also going to find a lot more people today who won't accept any reel that doesn't say Shimano.

Seriously fun thread, making me think about gettting out my old spinning stuff....

Someone asked for DAM reels.






A 330 and 110 side-by-side.

I just replaced the plastic oscillating slide disc in my father's Mitchell 314 and it will now return to service. It's a fairly smooth, little reel.

Not sure if it's a 'classic' but it's old. Here's the Airex Apache from the mid-50s.

Don´t forget LuXor.

The 500-sized Daiwa Mini-Mite.

Remember the tiny Zebco UL reels from the '70s? They had an "underspin" closed face reel that was made to fit an ultralight spinning rod. They were bright metal; miniature versions of the Zebco 33, IIRC. (I had the spincast version of the same reel mounted on a little pistol grip UL baitcasting rod, which I think was also made by Zebco. I had a lot of fun with that rig.)

The D.A.M. Quick 1001 is quite rare. Made in 1982. I consider it a modern classic (and a danged good reel).

well that was a steal - you could sell it to Japan for several hundred.

Also, there's a huge array of aftermarket improvements made for that particular reel.