You are not having much fun with your lift/drop..... keel.

I bought my new winch from trailertek:

http://www.trailertek.com/acatalog/Winches.html 

The price was the best I found at the time.

John Williams

275/60 CRYSTAL

We managed to drop Bright Eyes keel last week, a shackle parted,fortunately this happened in the marina and I think it hit the mud before the bottom of the boat. Managed to hook the after support eye using a hook taped to boat hook, then hoisted the keel again using the winch. This involved taking the steel cable off the winch. I was not particularly impressed with the winch so started looking for alternatives on the web, found one looking very similar to John's at Maplins for £50. But I would really like a hydraulic unit, so I am still looking. Now we have a Dyneema supported keel plus a spare length hanging in the locker with the retreval hook.

Jan Newman

275/8 Bright Eyes

The Strongarm winch doesn't really seem to be a piece of marine hardware, so I'm looking forward to hearing about any better alternatives.

Dick Garside

Dark Star P275 No 36

So I am not alone in destroying shackles coincidently I had had the shackle off the previous week for cleaning and checking the winch wire. In an ideal world there would be plenty of lubrication on the winch gears which would reduce their wear rate, but it would be bound to find it way into the forward cabin. Have any of the Dyneema fans considered using a block on the keel lift to create a 2:1 and reduce load on winch ?

Jan Newman

275/8

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rgarside/3537043866/ 

You can see how much of the material had been corroded. I don't know how long the shackle had been in use.

Dick

P275 No 36

quote:

---

Originally posted by Jan

Hi All

So I am not alone in destroying shackles coincidently I had had the shackle off the previous week for cleaning and checking the winch wire. In an ideal world there would be plenty of lubrication on the winch gears which would reduce their wear rate, but it would be bound to find it way into the forward cabin. Have any of the Dyneema fans considered using a block on the keel lift to create a 2:1 and reduce load on winch ?

Jan Newman

275/8

---

Dick

Dark Star P275 No 36

Good picture, very similar appearance to my shackle. I have done away with the shackle at the moment, knotting the dyneema directly into the eye of the lift bolt. I still have to change the bolt which i am a bit nervous about, so far have got no movement on it at all but it should move with the new tool in a 3/4" socket , will it move in the right place ?

Re winches I see a lot of vehicle winches of the type mounted on 4X4's for self rescue off road and these seem to have differential planetary gears in a lubricated gearbox, should be quieter and wear less, anybody have experience of these ?

For example

http://www.innovation-en...co.uk/electric_winch.htm 

Jan

275/8 Bright Eyes

After laying up the boat this winter, I lifted the keel out for a repaint. The lifting eyes on the keel are:-

Centre - 10mm eyebolt

Aft - 12mm eyenut

The eyebolt unscrewed quite easily - but with the keel out I was able to use a bar through the eye to move it. The eyenut unscrewed easily from the 12mm studding that is screwed into the keel. I have not tried to remove the studding from the keel - it should not present the main risk of failure.

A 12mm DIN eyenut has a SWL of 340kg.

A 10mm DIN eyebolt has a SWL of 230 kg. Though eyebolts with a breaking load of 2300 kg are readily available - giving a safety factor of 7.

I'll be replacing the 10mm eyebolt with a Wichard forged eyenut [MBL 4500 kg] with 316 10mm studding screwed into the keel.

I'll be replacing the 12mm eyenut with a Wichard one if I can find one.

I shall also be switching to Dyneema for the hoist line.

I had the keel blasted and primed, and have coated it with the KBS rust seal system. The next step is to fair the surface.

Regards

quote:

---

Originally posted by Jan

Hello Dick

Good picture, very similar appearance to my shackle. I have done away with the shackle at the moment, knotting the dyneema directly into the eye of the lift bolt. I still have to change the bolt which i am a bit nervous about, so far have got no movement on it at all but it should move with the new tool in a 3/4" socket , will it move in the right place ?

Re winches I see a lot of vehicle winches of the type mounted on 4X4's for self rescue off road and these seem to have differential planetary gears in a lubricated gearbox, should be quieter and wear less, anybody have experience of these ?

For example

http://www.innovation-en...co.uk/electric_winch.htm 

Jan

275/8 Bright Eyes

---

Dick

Dark Star P275 No 36

A usefull comments many thanks. I should bring you up to date with my efforts.

Firstly I must withdraw some of my criticism of the strongarm winch,I have greased mine quite generously and it sounds much happier and is loading the batteries less. A word of warning here, do not operate the winch without its cover after greasing, unless you want to spray the forecastle with grease. When eventually we made a tool for the keel lift ring, it came out easily and clean, it had been put in with some hardening sealand, loctite or similar. I have fitted a new one with anti seize grease. The thread size was M16 suitable for a 500Kg lift ring, I am told this was the size adopted by Parkers for the more recent 275/285s .In all this work I managed to snag the Dyneema keel hoist,so that got replaced.A constant education these boats.

Jan

275/8

Grrrr! We'd just loaded the boat on the Sunday of the recent half term week in preparation for a breezy blast to Lymington. There we would connect with the rest of the fleet and head towards Weymouth. With the engine started, I pressed the winch button to lower the keel and nothing happened. Mmm. I removed the winch cover to find a somewhat rusty motor. The winch wire comes in wet and then drips. After tapping and fiddling, there was still only the sound of the solenoid relay but no winch action. It had been sounding poorly recently but not that bad. The electrical junctions were free of corrosion. What next?

We placed a voltmeter across the power block to check the voltage and mysteriously it jumped into life. I know that measuring voltage across a motor cannot possible cause it to jump into life, but it did. With a week of holiday ahead, the plan was to lower the keel and, to hell with it, we'd sort everything out on our return in one week. Down it went and stayed there.

Coming back to Poole later, we did manage to coax it back into life to get the keep up to about half (torpedo) depth. Jumping to the end of the story, we returned to our drying berth on the Hamble where of course it refused to move, despite all forms of wriggling and tickling. No problem, I will find the freewheel lever and use the manual ratchet to get the keel up. Wrong. Although pleased with myself for finding the freewheel lever and the socket drive, it refused to move. Somehow the motor was not disengaging. Only my interest in it was disengaging. At this stage, I had the strongest feeling that I wanted Kate (keels passim) to come and save me.

Luckily Richard from Niquaydi was also in Deacons Yard. He proposed that we remove the clutch first. We did and still no manual winding was possible. Then he jammed a bar through the winch, to stop it paying out, and removed the motor. With beautifully synchronised movement between moving the manual socket arm and jamming with a screwdriver in-between raising it small amounts, we returned the keep to its rightful up and secured position while I went on to return the motor to its rightful position in the bin. Richard did suggest that we could easily get another motor but after two failures I have had enough of it.

Next steps: first I will go back to the original manual keel bridge, but upgrade the pulleys to ball raced pulleys (one three pulley, one two) and plumb them in as Tim and Margaret have done on Speedwell. After trying this for a while, maybe we will advance to John Dinwiddy's scheme of getting a power kit for the regular winch on the coach roof. The Barton blocks add up to around £170. I will check again with Tim before placing my order and let you know the parts list in case you want to follow this scheme.

Happy sailing [:)]

Ken

Ken Surplice

Commodore

Regards

Dick

quote:

---

Originally posted by Ken Surplice

R.I.P. WINCH NUMBER 2

Grrrr! We'd just loaded the boat on the Sunday of the recent half term week in preparation for a breezy blast to Lymington. There we would connect with the rest of the fleet and head towards Weymouth. With the engine started, I pressed the winch button to lower the keel and nothing happened. Mmm. I removed the winch cover to find a somewhat rusty motor. The winch wire comes in wet and then drips. After tapping and fiddling, there was still only the sound of the solenoid relay but no winch action. It had been sounding poorly recently but not that bad. The electrical junctions were free of corrosion. What next?

We placed a voltmeter across the power block to check the voltage and mysteriously it jumped into life. I know that measuring voltage across a motor cannot possible cause it to jump into life, but it did. With a week of holiday ahead, the plan was to lower the keel and, to hell with it, we'd sort everything out on our return in one week. Down it went and stayed there.

Coming back to Poole later, we did manage to coax it back into life to get the keep up to about half (torpedo) depth. Jumping to the end of the story, we returned to our drying berth on the Hamble where of course it refused to move, despite all forms of wriggling and tickling. No problem, I will find the freewheel lever and use the manual ratchet to get the keel up. Wrong. Although pleased with myself for finding the freewheel lever and the socket drive, it refused to move. Somehow the motor was not disengaging. Only my interest in it was disengaging. At this stage, I had the strongest feeling that I wanted Kate (keels passim) to come and save me.

Luckily Richard from Niquaydi was also in Deacons Yard. He proposed that we remove the clutch first. We did and still no manual winding was possible. Then he jammed a bar through the winch, to stop it paying out, and removed the motor. With beautifully synchronised movement between moving the manual socket arm and jamming with a screwdriver in-between raising it small amounts, we returned the keep to its rightful up and secured position while I went on to return the motor to its rightful position in the bin. Richard did suggest that we could easily get another motor but after two failures I have had enough of it.

Next steps: first I will go back to the original manual keel bridge, but upgrade the pulleys to ball raced pulleys (one three pulley, one two) and plumb them in as Tim and Margaret have done on Speedwell. After trying this for a while, maybe we will advance to John Dinwiddy's scheme of getting a power kit for the regular winch on the coach roof. The Barton blocks add up to around £170. I will check again with Tim before placing my order and let you know the parts list in case you want to follow this scheme.

Happy sailing [:)]

Ken

Ken Surplice

Commodore

---

Some weeks after our electric winch failure, we are back in action having reverted to manual lifting. I re-installed the original stainless steel bridge over the keel and started to replace all blocks with Barton ball raced blocks. Here's my parts list:

- 15320 triple block, size 5, reverse shackle

- 15220 double block, size 5, reverse shackle

- 14150 upright bock, size 4

- 15180 single variloc block, size 5, * 2

- 12.5m 10mm dyneema rope

Notes: [1] 'reverse shackle' means a shackle can be rotated 90 degrees if required. [2] the size 4 upright block is as big as they come. [3] Variloc means the attachment can be rotated and set at a variety of angles, or swivel freely. [4] The upright block is the one that sits on the stainless steel bridge. Our original arrangement was a size 3 block.

I am pleased with the result so far but as always, nothing was straightforward so let me tell the tale.

GETTING THE BLOCKS

None of the blocks were in stock at any local chandlers, mostly stocking only up to size 4, so I ordered them from Whitstable Marine as they are very close to Bartons. It seems that Barton is having some production problems and my order was still not shipped after waiting for two weeks. With the boat out of action in mid summer, I called Barton to see if anything could be done to accelerate delivery of the main items - the double and triple block. With the most wonderful customer service I could imagine, Barton reported that they had one part ready and then called me back after talking with their production manager who kindly promised to make up the other block by noon next day. Whitstable Marine kindly drove to Bartons the next day and just after that Mrs S called in en-route to visit family in Maidstone.

ROPE TRICK

Armed with the double and triple blocks, my plan was to fit those and re-use the old bridge block and single blocks, renewing them later when available. Our manual says the keel rope should be 12mm but this diameter rope hardly fitted through bridge upright block. It rubbed more on the cheeks of the block than on the sheave. How had this worked before? We could not find any bridge upright block to fit 12mm rope. We tried at "The Barge" chandlery which stocks tons of used bits and pieces. We found a combination of stainless garage and old pulley which may work in future. On calling in at another chandlery to get the rope, we were advised that 10mm dyneema would be more than adequate.

This triggered a long discussion. The proprietor was very knowledgeable in rope work. He eloquently and convincingly maintained that:

- ball raced blocks were really designed to pay out quickly, not for easy pulling in

- the balls would distort under load

- a solid spindle was just as good as bearings

- two triple blocks with no ball race, with fiddle and becket would be perfectly friction-free.

The problem is that this is what we started with years ago and I know it is hard work winding up with this arrangement. We bought our rope and a ball raced size 3 upright (same size as before but now ball raced and happy to fit the 10mm dyneema). Incidentally, the old upright block had worn to the extent of having an elliptical centre.

CHOCKS AWAY

Back at the boat, the keel was up, hanging on the safety/parking strop. The keel cover was off, with the parking strop bar wedged between two temporary blocks of wood straddling the keel. This meant we had good access to the top of the keel and there was no need to dry out or crane out to make the changes. With help from friends, we refitted the stainless steel hanger and threaded the pulleys using the same method prescribed by Tim from Speedwell. Instead of having a stopper knot through the keel box roof, I used another block of wood as a temporary measure until everything looked right. The main snag was the upright pulley. Even though it was the same brand and size as the original, the mounting holes have changed over time. We eventually managed to drill new holes in the mounting plates. In no time at all, we wound up the keep on the new arrangement, removed the parking strop, lowered the keel to 1/3 depth and then wound it back up. Marvellous! The only other snag is that the new dyneema slips through our old and worn rope clutches. The next job is to replace them.

DO THE TWIST

Before I fit the keel box cover, I need to remove about 30 degrees of twist from the pulleys. This is induced as the keel eye bold is not at right angles to the lifting block. This is my next job to tackle. I am wondering if the keel eye will object to being eased by these 30 degrees. It can't twist out with the shackle attached so it is just a measure of losing a smidgeon of thread to thread contact. Advice anybody?

ELECTRIFYING STUFF

The plan was to then fit a larger, size 40, winch to the roof, replacing our size 16. I know that John Dinwiddie has a powered winch but not which size. We'll see how we get on with manual winding first then decide what is next.

HANGING AROUND

Our parking/safety strop has single loop on it to hold the keel fully up. I am sure I have seen another P275 with a second strop half way down. If we adopted this technique, we could peg the keel up, half down or fully down and at each point the ball-raced pulleys would not be left under tension for any length of time. This would be perfect.

To be continued....

Ken Surplice

Commodore

I am back to report peace and tranquillity. The last piece of the story was to get a new safety strop. For the modest sum of £38 from my local riggers, I now have a wire strop that can hang the keel either all the way up, as before, or halfway down. So the keel is now either up, halfway down, or all the way down. In each of these three positions there is no load on the ball bearings so they will never deform. They will last forever, at least in my mind.

We were considering converting the coach roof winch to electric drive or our manual rope system but no more. It is so easy to wind up the keel that we'll just leave it all manual. it doesn't take long either. The keel box lid is now back on, the lifting rope is marked so I know when we are approaching half depth or all the way up. We've been out for a few weekends with the new configuration and I must say that I have never been happier. I have total peace of mind with the new setup. Thank you Tim, Speedwell, for pointing me in the right direction. The only improvement I should make is to add half a meter to the length of the keel rope. It is a tiny bit short but we can manage with it.

Unfortunately we're now at the end of our season but roll on, or should I say up and down, 2011.

Cheers! Ken

Ken Surplice

Commodore

Glad it is all working well. Are you using the size 16 winch, or a larger one?

Regards

Dick

Dick

Dark Star P275 No 36

A bit late but let me answer now. We have the standard size 16 winch. Sue and I were thinking of going electric but at least for the next ten years we will find keel work so easy and pleasurable that we will be fighting over who will do the keel winching rather than who will avoid it [:)].

Cheers-Ken

Ken Surplice

Commodore

I need a manual system because the beggars I race against have decided Rule 52.2 outlaws use of an electric winch so I have to choose my keel position before the start and leave it there throughout. It's a pain if I run aground (which happens about once a fortnight!) because I can't just press the button and get out of trouble without having to retire.

Also I am nearly at 100 posts and looking for that 4th gold star[:)]

Kate

Ken has reverted to the original layout on the deck, which we both had (he is sail no 25 - I am 28). The clever bit is the new block arrangement in the box.

To describe what happens on deck :- the rope comes back from the top of the keel box to a running block attached to the starboard side of the mast base. It then goes to the far starboard end of the fixed set of running blocks that take all the halyards etc. It then comes back via the outer starboard runner on the similar set of blocks near the cockpit and from there straight round the starboard coach roof winch.

I will see if I have a photo.

Cheers

Tim

Kate

Yes it is 6 to 1 but with a size 16 winch and the new set up with a stop knot as described by Ken it is not too difficult to manage.

The rope comes to the winch via a clutch which is kept down when you are winching. There is therefore no risk of dropping the keel until you lift the clutch. You obviously need to be dead careful about having a turn round the winch when you let the keel down, but in 11 years I have never been silly - yet!

Tim

Kate

Every time I read this thread about electric winch failures, I have a minor panic and resolve to do something sensible to prevent ours going the same way...

So, here I am, wondering if anyone has any measurements for a safety strop as described by Ken, so as to hold the keel either up, down or half way. (We could work it out, but if anyone's got the measurements already, it would save time/energy etc!)

It sounds like a v good idea and easy to fit - replacing the original 'up' loop I presume?

Any inspiration or information welcome to prevent another winch casualty on these pages!

All the best,

June T

(275, No. 6)