Last week I blogged about the joys of bedding deck fittings with butyl rather than epoxy. It’s like using putty, very easy to handle and seems effective. One word of caution, be careful when you use it to bed winches.
I bedded a winch using butyl and it was greatly in need of it. The halyard winch on the coach-house had been poorly bedded and seems to be the source of moisture in the balsa core. Oh, goodie!
I put a lot of butyl under the winch base. After tightening the winch back on the coach-house, I took it partially apart to grease it. When I tried to re-assemble it, a couple of small shafts that hold the gears in place popped up and would not go back in place. Short of hammering these shafts hard, I could not get the little buggers down. Three of us spent 45 minutes tinkering with it, couldn’t figure it out and gave up.
Today, I was back doing a bunch of random jobs (replacing zincs, greasing stuff, tightening lifelines, while the missus cleaned the teak and vinyl down below). I figured I would take the bloody thing apart and see what the problem was. Given how these winches can be a nightmare to reassemble, this was a big risk, especially given my propensity to cock things up.
Actually this was the best thing I could have done. I have Harken winches that are surprisingly simple to service and I quickly found the source of the problem.
When you tighten a fitting onto the deck, the butyl squeezes out. In fact it squeezes into whereever it can go. In addition to oozing out the sides of the winch, it pushed up into the winch itself. It was filling the hole in the gear where the shaft fits and thus pushed up the shaft like a piston. The butyl was also starting to work its way into the gears. I am glad I caught this as I was able to pick butyl out of the hole in th gear and remove the excess that was starting clog the gears.
What did I learn?
If you want a job done well, leave it and do it next week.