May 21, 2020
Our anchor windlass has been slowing down for a while now. I took out the motor and had it checked and was told it was like new. Voltage drop?
Yep, that’s what it was. I measured the voltage drop across the various cables while bringing up the anchor (to load the winch) and found that we were losing almost two volts across the ground cable. Usually, that’s just a bad connection, but in this case, the problem went deeper.
The end pulled off the cable without too much difficulty – a bad sign! The wire inside was like powder. In this situation, I’d usually just cut a little wire back a little and put a new fitting on the end. With the severity of the corrosion, I had a bad feeling about this solution. I cut the wire a few meters from either end and this is what I found…
I’ll need to replace the entire cable all the way back to the batteries. Yuk. I guess I’m glad we found it before it failed and we had 50 meters of chain to pull in by hand! -Rich
