Quote:
Originally Posted by GrahamHO
Jim, of course we also need to maintain our anchor winches. I'm sure you do.
I overlooked greasing some bit and my windlass stopped working. Anyway I took it to the factory and they told me I should have removed the drum and greased it every year at least and it does say that in the instructions. (I know what to do now when it's in front of me)
All I'm saying is that I'm sure lots of people run their winches or windlasses until they break.
They are of course not only doused in salt spray but also abrasive sand and mud.
A little dismantling cleaning and greasing or oil top up if necessary every year at least should make them last. I make sure I do that now.
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Graham, let me make this clear: the S/L Hyspeed failed when internal
parts broke from overstress, not from any lack of
maintenance. The overstress was attempting to
lift my 45 lb anchor and the smaller anchor of a French boat who had laid his over mine. This is the sort of thing that happens in the real world, and which your anchor
gear needs to be able to handle without breaking.
The
Maxwell sprague clutches failed when some
water got past the NON-REPLACEABLE shaft
seals and caused
corrosion. The manual said that the internal lube was permanent. There was no drain nor fill access for renewing the lubricant.
Neither of these failures were due to poor
maintenance.
The first VCW failure was due to poor design... no seal on the mainshaft which allows
water to run down into the aluminium housing mentioned. There was a weep hole, about 3 mm in diameter, which was supposed to drain off any water that entered. It didn't, and the resulting
corrosion, working from the inside outwards and thus invisible to the operator finally caused the failure. The second VCW had a
shaft seal and a redesigned part between the
deck casting and the
gearbox... much better. The
gear failure was likely due to the overload that I described, although the time delay between the incident and the failure makes the connection a bit suspect. This failure is clearly due to inappropriate usage, ie operator error, but of a sort that is not exceptional in the real world. But NOT due to poor maintenance.
Once again, the point of my post was that manual windlasses are not a panacea of
reliability, indestructible and eternal, and that
electrical windlasses don't always fail due to
electrical faults, and in fact are similarly reliable to their manual brethren, both being installed and maintained to recommended specifications.
I'll jump down off my soapbox now...
Jim