Windlass had been working fine for the 2 months I have had the
boat, when I recently ran into difficulties when trying to
lift the
anchor after it had drifted several hundred feet in a very weedy area and accumulated a HUGE amount of weeds that the
windlass couldn't
lift and ended up tripping the 70A breaker. Took me a while to locate the problem and breaker. In the meantime I located the solenoid and had a look inside it, it looked quite clean although I couldn't figure out how to completely dismantle it to get at the actual contacts. I reset the breaker and the
motor works fine in DOWN mode but when trying UP mode, with no load on it at all, actually feeding free chain from above, it strains to turn but acts again like it's under tremendous strain and I suspect if I held it on for m ore than 1 second, it will trip the breaker again. Any suggestions, ideas? If it was a brush problem in the
motor, would it still
work fine in DOWN mode? The situation is the same whether I use the toggle switch at the
helm or the
remote switch at the windlass.