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Date: Wed, 4 Jan 2023 01:18:00 GMT
Windlass
Good morning chain locker!
This morning Melodi and Paul had to leave to drive back home. It was
wonderful seeing them. So I took them to the dinghy dock at 0600 in the
morning. We had a wonderful few days. The boat feels empty now...
Yesterday we went sailing and as we were pulling up the anchor the
windlass stopped working. So we had to pull the chain up manually with
the lever. This morning we had to get on it to start fixing it.
It was working fine and then we pressed the button and it just went click
and that was it. There is a relay in the mix, so we press a button and
that fires the relay that provides power to the windlass. Sam and I spent
most of the day working on it one piece at a time. First we tested to see
if voltage was getting to the motor and it was so that eliminated the
relay and the wiring. With the thought that it might be the motor I took
apart the windlass and removed the motor. I started disassembling the
motor to get to the brushes to check them. And all 4 of the brushes were
better than 50% good so it wasn't the brushes. That left me a bit
baffeled. I called a couple shops in Miami that rebulid DC motors but
before I left I decided to test the motor by jumping it straight to a
battery. And guess what? It ran just fine. So I started checking the
wiring again. I hooked everything back up and checked the amperage
between the motor and the positive wire. I could only pull .25 amps not
even enough to spark. After hours of tracing we discovered that bolts
that hold the windlass to the deck were going through an aluminum cross
member that was the ground for the windlass. The dissimilar metals had
corroded and we couldn't get enough amps through. After cleaning the
connections and putting some anti-corosion spray on them the windlass
works great. It was all a bad ground.
I feel a lot better about things when they don't require hundreds of
dollars to fix.
In the late afternoon Mom and Sam and I went out for ice cream and to pick
up my debit/credit card at Fed Ex. We were also going to watch a movie
but the theater was closed for some maintenance problem. That evening we
went to fresh market to get dinner and then came back to the boat.