I had already rebuilt the damaged main winch. I went to the marina to replace them and do some clean-and-lube maintenance on the other winches.

As I positioned the base plate for one of the main winches on the bracket I noticed that the six mounting holes didn't line up. I rotated the winch base on the bracket and found that I couldn't make the holes line up at all. I tried the base plate for the other winch and, after trying all the possible positions found the one orientation where the holes on the base plate lined up with the holes on the mounting bracket.



I've concluded that the holes in the base plate were custom drilled. That is, you can not take someone else's base plate and just bolt it to your boat. Fortunately, the base plate has few moving parts and will probably last as long as the boat. Still, a little standardization would have been nice. I had cannibalized a winch to fix this one. If I had simply tried to use the other winch, or the entire winch innards, I would have been screwed.



After mounting the base plate, I affixed the pedestal. Recall that this is the part that I had to replace. As I'm bolting the pedestal into place, I note that it is held to the base plate with only three bolts. Yet the base plate is held to the bracket with six (larger) bolts. And the bracket is held to the hull with three very large bolts. I would think that if the pedestal, which carries the entire load on the winch, can be attached to the base plate with only three rather small bolts, then the base plate would probably only need three bolts to attach it to the bracket. I wonder why they used six?



After the pedestal was attached to the base, the rest of the winch went back together without drama. I replaced the old top plate with the chrome ones on the winches I bought for parts. Pretty!



Then I took apart each of the three smaller halyard winches (Barlow #16) located on the mast. Since I was working on them on board Galena, I didn't have to remove the bases from the mast. I used mineral spirits to clean the parts and bearings, and boat trailer bearing grease to relub everything. I found two broken pawl springs. One of the pawls had been damaged by its broken spring and had to be replaced.

One of the pawl sockets on a mast winch was elongated and could only barely hold the pawl. My guess is that some heavy shock loads from the halyard on the winch drum caused the damage. While the pawl would stay in the socket, the spring would not. And the pawl would not rotate freely. I simply tapped on the lip of the socket with a small hammer until the socket was round again. Then everything worked fine. The bronze is soft and it only took four light taps to bend the lip back into place.


So that job is done and the five winches are good for another year (or two).