Two Engineers and an IT guy tackle an Intermittent Windlass

Stan and Marcel are oilmen – engineers first for Shell, now line executives. Stan is off for a four year assignment in Singapore where he oversees 15Billion of turnover. Marcel is in between assignments having finished running the oil company in New Zealand he’s eyeing an opportunity in Ethiopia. Me, I’m just an IT guy from Vancouver.

A boat in the Med without a windlass can’t really go anywhere. Unlike my brother-in-law Mike who would prefer to hand haul the anchor up and eschews such comforts as a windlass, a 50 foot boat without an operating windlass is nearly impossible to retrieve the anchor.



Marcel supervising, Matt and Stan working on the windlass.

We tied off the anchor so it wouldn’t slip and proceeded to do problem determination. First we checked the switch, all OK. When the switch was thrown we could hear the solenoid clicking off. The circuit breaker was OK. We pulled the cover off the winch to check the motor and the connections were clean and all good.  The electrical connections on the winch have two positive and one negative. One positive connection turns the winch one way, the other causes the electric motor to go the opposite way.

When we tested it both positive connections showed voltage in both up and down directions. This is usually caused by worn brushes. Off came the windlass, off came the motor, and out came the brushes. We cleaned them (sanded them flat again) and then we reinstalled the windlass motor – problem solved. We also cleaned and greased all the moving parts including the clutch and the manual retrieval mechanism. Stan delighted in testing it – man was it smooth and powerful.
 

I went back to Tara and tore my winch down later that same day. I hadn’t serviced it yet this year and so I disassembled it and greased all the connections. I reckoned that if we did it for Marcel, Tara’s winch might get jealous and act up too.

The only thing left to do is purchase a few of these brushes and then install them on Tara to ensure the same intermittent windlass doesn’t happen to us.

Sunset on Poros