Thursday, March 26, 2015

New manual windlass

In my effort to get our Tashiba 31 as self sufficient as possible, I installed a manual windlass made by Lofrans. It is of good quality and a quarter of the cost of a replacement for the Muir Cougar windlass that was originally installed on Oriana, plus it's powered by good old fashioned muscle instead of electricity which can fail. Originally I had taken apart the old windlass which is powered  basically by a starter motor in hopes to fix it only to find the stators completely corroded.  In fact one of them turned to dust in my hands. That's what 30 years of a marine environment can do when things aren't properly maintained. Anyway, I replaced the old with the new. And in order to use the existing mounting holes, I fabricated a mount out of 1/4" stainless steel plate which I drilled holes in that matched the original windlass. Then I bolted the Lofrans on to the steel plate and through bolted the plate through the bowsprit and deck. Here are the results:

The Lofrans Royal manual windlass Installed. Notice how it lines up with the hawse pipe. Works very nicely by the way.

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