Manual down rigger question

[livinisfishin]

I have a friend that has two manual big jon down riggers he wants to sell to me. My question is can I add a line counter to them somehow?

[Freshtrax]

If you have line counter reels, and your running 30 ft leads, When you get to 100 ft of line out your roughly down 70 ft.

[Gnote]

My first riggers were invaders with broken counters, we measured how long each turn was (2.5ft) and counted turns to the desired depth.

Tedious at times but it worked. I tried to find counters for them but with no luck. Hope this helps.

[NANUK]

Hard to say without looking at the rigger, all depends on the model, on most models you can add a counter

Can you get some pictures ? specially from the top, between the handle and pully,

[John Bacon]

If not, you can try colouring your down rigger cable the way lead core is coloured. That will give you a good estimate of how much line is out.

[BillM]

Shouldn't be very hard to add a counter, although not an ideal setup.... What happened to the counters that were on them originally?