You would be amazing at how difficult that can be for some of my customers.

Exactly! I need a client proof system!

Put a small piece of brightly colored tape around the rod at the 2 foot mark. Tell them to pull from reel to tape for each 2 feet.

In Texas lakes, you'll rarely be more than 40 feet deep.

You don't understand how bad non fishermen are.

It seems coincidental that all 4 reels have failed at one time. I can understand that one has a broken line counter. The info you have provided leads me to think that the ratios are off. You may have lost some line over the past year and without a full spool the gear ratios will be off. It soundslike you only have half spools of line and that will change the ratio. Think about it a full spool will only have to turn once to play out the same amount of line as a 1/2 full. Spool different ratio.
If you find that all the reels are faulty, just use the reels for vertical presentations and forget the counters and follow the good suggestions from the other contributors. If you are using these for trolling and want to let a 100 feet or more out is harder to feed it out a few feet at a,time. If that is the case go buy new takota 300 or 500s. KEEP the spools full or you may not like them either. Good luck

I ordered a tekota 300 to try out. I think I upgraded from 20 pound braid to 30 pound a few months ago and maybe I need to redo it and put more string on them but they are more than 1/2 -3/4 full. It may be just that simple and probably is. I didn�t think it would make that significant of a difference but maybe it just needs more! Makes me wonder if I put something like 80 pound braid to help fill it up faster.

Put mono line on the reel until it is partially filled and add the braid line until the reel is full. 20 lb mono as a backer will fill the reel much quicker and will save the expense of filling the reel with braid. These mechanical line counter reels are not super accurate and if they are not fully spooled it will compound the the error. Fishing vertically say 20-30 feet they are pretty close. If you are trolling letting out say 125 feet the reel will be less accurate but, here you are looking for repeatability. If you are,catching fish at a certain trolling,speed with a certain amount of line out you just repeat the process no need to be so accurate. Spool up and go getum

Well I feel like a big dummy! I re-spooled them with 80-pound braid and before I cut the string from the big spool, I would march it out to 25 feet and 50 feet in my drive way and finally found how much string I need to put on it to be accurate. Totally my fault....my first time to really use line counter reels but I'm glad its figured out now. I think I got super lucky when I spooled them the first time but a few months ago when I upgraded to different string I was stingy and didn't spool it enough. FYI, if you own a 6500 LC and want to put 80 pound braid on it...Zero the line counter out and reel until it says "675" and stop spooling. This will be the perfect amount of string. Its probably about 100 yards of string if I were guessing.

One of the four reels still will not zero out though no matter what I do. I am almost betting there is a shad scale that slipped into the housing and I have not found a way to clean it out. They are solid reels if I haven't had such heck zeroing the counters out.

I use two Shimano Tekota 300LC for anything on the lakes around here. I replaced my 2 Abu Garcia Abassadeur 6000 (junk, side plate broke off from just reeling in a fish). For line, I use 40# Super 8 Slick Power Pro. I use a ton of backing and about 300 yds of braid. Make sure the spool is full to about 90%. So far. the Line counter has be very accurate for me. And the Tekota's are built like a tank.

Awesome! I�m hoping the Tekota 300 I have coming next week will be a reel that lasts a �reel� long time. I can�t believe I�m about to replace the whole line contour out on one of my almost brand new Abu 6500. It will not zero out at all and worst yet....their customer service will not return my two emails. I think I will make them my downrigger rods as I don�t care about the line counter for that and switch over to tekota 300s for shad fishing

Good luck. Tight lines!