Manual windlass rebuild

I don’t object to the luxury of an electric windlass on principle, but it didn’t take much to put me off buying one. I have an anchor locker at the bow with a hatch in the foredeck, but it is not sufficiently deep or dry enough to house a motor.

Also, I don’t anchor very often – lunch breaks or the odd spot of fishing mostly. So the extra cost and the prospect of a major reworking of the foredeck and forecabin put me off an electric windlass.

But to my surprise I found manual windlass options to be quite thin on the ground. The Lofrans Royal windlass was the only suitable manual model I found, but a new one was still expensive.

So I looked for