Did Shimano ever make any "clunker" reels??

[DTack]

I believe the Old Corsair was one.

[B-Dozer]

I can tell you brother, it wasn't much good for casting anything after I took it apart trying to disable the stinking flippin' switch. I have taken many things apart in my lifetime, but that was one aggravation to put back together. I finally dumpsterized it. ;D

The trick is, you have to be smarter than what you're working with :

OH MY GOD!!! HA, HA, HA, you got me...I'm so freaking stupid I can't put a reel back together. It went into the dumpster AFTER I put it back together and used it for a couple of years. It never had half the performance of my Bantams. For some reason, I thought I'd re-activate the flippin' switch, so I took it apart again. Then I decided to throw it away...

Kinda late now---but you could have stuck some duct tape over the switch! The things we do when we were younger

[Dave P]

Amen to that, brother! I still had that Bantam until it flew out of the boat going down the highway this year!

[goblue]

I owned a first generation shimano coriolis in the late 80s/ early nineties... a shiny black and it had the flippin switch that some of you were talking about, and true to form that reel crapped out on me in the first couple of months. that reel was supposed to be one of their higher end selections back in the day, but i can guarantee you there was a design defect with that reel. 

the quintessential clunker... thankfully shimano hasnt had something that bad in a while, but the corsair in the late 90s came pretty close.