Those of you with a windlass made by Simpson Lawrence should get them checked out. Met someone else yesterday with the same manufacturing fault as me, defective seals means water passes THROUGH the middle, rotting/ breaking the bearings within and letting water into your boat. Not good...
Check your windlass!?
- Thread starter Scallywag-l36
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Just Did
I just pulled the top of my windless up so to clean and lub it and it is working great,it was making some noise and so I did the cleaning and lub and working with out the noise any more but do need to check under the veeberth for any leaks.
I will check for leaks this weekend.
Nick
I just pulled the top of my windless up so to clean and lub it and it is working great,it was making some noise and so I did the cleaning and lub and working with out the noise any more but do need to check under the veeberth for any leaks.
I will check for leaks this weekend.
Nick
Scallywag, thanks for the notice, but too late for me. Found water got to bearing even with the area fully packaged with grease. Bearing is shot, circlip under the bearing corroded and broke off, rusted the drive shaft. Motor totally shot (but not due to water). Anyhow, getting news parts like bearing, circlips and O-ring is cheap (3rd party Japanese parts) and repair easily done. Expensive is the motor.
During commissioning this spring, I too found I had a water leak through my windlass. I thought it was coming from around the base and just flowing into the center where the hole was cut. Probably the same leak! Looked like dried muddy water on my electrical wires. What is the repair and where do you get the parts?
Thanks so much for posting this. I have a SL windlass about 5 years old and I inspected beneath the unit from below and sure enough there was evidence of rusty water dripping. So I disassembled the above deck components. I have typically disassembled it to a point each year for lubrication but this time I removed the lower cone and sure enough there was a rusty grease mixture in there above the bearing and the top circlip. So I cleaned it all out and repacked it with water pump grease. I was reluctant to remove the circlip as I don't have the spares yet to replace. The bearing seemed fine and the circlip was rusty, but seemed structurally ok. So, I will order the parts to carry in case but I also sealed all around the base of the windlass and will cover it from now on to prevent water from finding it's way into the unit.
Does anyone have a source for these parts they can share.
Thanks again for bringing this up.
Rick, not sure which parts you're referring to but if it's the bearing and circlips, I suppose you could get it from auto supply stores. Got my circlip from there and bearing from a bearings supplier. Any decent brands of bearing would be fine. Just make sure you don't throw away the old ones as they could measure it to get the right replacement. The original bearing has a rubber seal around the race. The seal was broken in mine so I guess that's how the water gets in. On hindsight I should have gotten a metal seal ones as replacement i.s.o. yet another rubber ones.
For those of you in UK, checkout www.slspares.co.uk . The guy there is ex SL employee and engineer and bought a whole bunch of spares and stock when they went bust. Also does toilet parts, servicing etc
Ya know, after giving this a lot of thought it really occurred to me that these units should be covered when not in use. If one simply scans the exploded drawing in the installation documents it can be seen that water has several different ways to find it's way down to the bearings. Straight down as in rain water for instance. On my previous boat I had an Ideal windlass which I kept covered when not in use. However, there was no exposed bearing as in this design and no direct downward path for water to reach the gearbox and motor. Duhhhhh111. So why didn't I cover this one? So shame on me for not seeing this sooner. I now have a custom cover in place on this thing to hopefully prevent further water damage.
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