FWIW,
We have an old style Furlex on our
genoa. The manual says to grease it with their proprietary grease as noted above, but it fails to indicate how much to use. So, for years I was under lubing my unit, and eventually it began to seize up. First I squirted heaps of degreaser through the bearings, making a great mess on the
deck. I then put a Zerk fitting into the access hole for the internal main bearing and forced a LOT of generic
marine grease into it. Voila! it worked again! A couple of years later I had the
mast out for some rehab and a local rigger helped by disassembling the lower unit. We found a lot of non-spherical s/s balls in the races. Replacing these made it even better!
All in all, I think that it is a lousy design, but then, this one is 23 years old and has done over 100K miles, so I guess I should just shut up and maintain it!
Cheers,
Jim