I bet the neighbor's friend put too much grease all over the place and eliminated freespool.
I too service my own reels and have done that before, because I thought "too much grease can't be bad, right? It'll only protect the parts.."
and made sure I packed the bearings (including spool bearings) with heavy marine grease. 30 seconds of freespool went to 6 seconds. Ended up taking it all apart and removed excess grease and oiled spool bearing with Reel X and was back to normal.
If you are a little handy, you can definately do it yourself.
Here's something you can refer to..
http://alantani.com/index.php?topic=16.0
