I have one Curado and LOTS of the Abu Garcis C3's. I like the lower profile of the curado. I used to own C4's but I got rid of them after several stripped their gears out. The local reel repair place told me that they had had lots in with the same problem and that they felt that the problem was the extra load caused by the 6.5 to 1 gear ratio. I'm guessing that it was a bad choice of gear material, but I wasn't going to have another one fail on me.