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Taking care of a drooping pan.

The pan of sheet metal between the reel mech and the hopper is very important.  It keeps springs, clips, and other stuff out of your hopper. Nothing worse than getting a nut in your hopper, and having it take out the hopper knife.
The pan in Betty's case is custom because it is such a wide body.  And, the right side "L" bracket that holds the pan up onto the handle box is missing.  So we'll make one out of some spare angle aluminum.
Normally, I could make the piece and install it without doing any major removal of parts.  However, when I checked the two mounting holes on the handle box, one of them is plugged.  So, we'll pull out the right side shelf bracket and get a better look at what's going on.

First, remove the two screws in the back that hold the Beau plug bracket onto the right shelf handle bracket.  This allows the plug assembly to drop down slightly so that you can remove the right shelf bracket.

You can also loosen the two screws on the Left side, to let your plug bracket drop down even more.  We don't need to here, since the pan is so wide there's lots of play

Then, remove the two 7/16 nuts, front and back, and the pan is ready to drop, and the shelf bracket can be lifted out.  Please note, if you do already have a lower pan bracket (which we're going to install) then you must remove those 2 screws also to get the pan to drop down.
Picture of front nut.

Picture of back nut, You can almost see it there hiding.

So what we see is that the back hole for the bracket is ok,

...but the front one has a broken-off screw in the hole.  I don't have a screw extractor, so we're going to leave that as it is, and instead make a new hole toward the front of the shelf bracket.

And then with the aluminum cut to size, and drilled, we can put everything back together and the pan will stay in place like it is supposed to.  Right now, since it drops down every time I pull the hopper, I have to hold it up to get the hopper to fit back in.  Very annoying.

Actually, I only inserted the back screw, because it was fairly easy to drill the front hole through the aluminum and the handle bracket with everything already back in place.

Front hole drilled in place.
Screw and nut inserted to hold it up.

Now you should know, as I discovered I had forgotten, the sequence of putting this back together is important.  Especially if you are rebuilding or replacing your handle box.  You must screw in the pan mount BEFORE you tighten up the 7/16 nuts. There is a little bit of slop in the right hand shelf bracket, and if you titen the two 7/16 nuts first, your holes for the pan bracket may not line up.

A handy tip here, if you ever have to replace one of the two screws that hold the pan bracket in place onto the handle box, please do NOT use a longer screw.   If you do, it will for sure hit onto your handle gears and lock up the handle.  I've seen mechanics replace a handle box, and when they're done, the handle won't pull.  It is because they put too long a screw in there.
I've done it too, and my first thought was that I put a bad handle in.  However, since then, I always bench test a new handle before I even think about installing.it.
Wasn't that fun?

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