Pro Tips for Servicing Your Winches
A confession to start: these winches hadn’t been serviced in eighteen months, well past the point they should have been touched. The general rule worth following is a quick pop of the top, a look inside, and a wipe-down every thousand miles or so. Eighteen months and a lot of sea miles later, it was time to find out how much damage that gap had actually done — and to see how a genuinely thorough service holds up over time when it’s done properly the first time.
Everything here applies whether you’re running Harken, Andersen, or anything else. The methodology of pulling a winch apart varies slightly by brand, but the gears, the greases, the oils, and how you apply them are the same regardless of who made the drum. What does change is cruising versus racing. Race winches get set up to spin with as little friction as possible, which means leaning more on oils than greases. On a cruising boat, grease over oil is the better call — it sticks where you put it and does a better job keeping water out, which matters more than shaving off friction when you’re not racing round marks.
Eighteen Months Overdue
The winches in question are Andersen 46s, fully mechanical — nothing electric anywhere on this boat — and original to Paikea, meaning they’re pushing thirty years old. The previous owner had given them a genuinely hard time: bent and buckled jaws and strippers, and grease inside that had gone from lubricant to something closer to concrete. That first strip-down years ago needed petrol just to break the old grease down enough to remove it — not a method to reach for casually, but effective when everything’s baked solid and a proper degreaser isn’t to hand.
The encouraging news, eighteen months on from a proper first service: the inside of the winch wasn’t caked in grease, which is exactly what you want to see. A little dirty, a bit of water intrusion from a salty sail, but nothing close to the disaster the “before” state had been. The grease itself was still doing its job — not dried out, not gone stiff, still visibly greasy where it needed to be.
One casualty on the way apart: a bearing retaining clip snapped during removal. These clips are surprisingly hard to source on short notice, so rather than delay the job it went back together without a replacement — worth flagging as a spares item to carry if you’re doing this offshore or somewhere remote.
Grease and Oil: What Works and What Doesn’t
Not every grease belongs inside a winch, and it’s worth being specific about what actually works. Liqui Moly Marine Winch Grease — a German product, sourced this time somewhere around Croatia or Greece — held up impressively over the eighteen-month, high-mileage gap: stayed workably liquid rather than drying out, though it runs a touch draggy if you’re chasing minimum friction the way a race setup would want.
For the pawls specifically — the small silver components that let the winch ratchet — a light smear of Harken Pawl Oil does the job. It displaces the grease slightly right where the pawls click, which keeps the action crisp, while the grease itself stays put everywhere else to keep water out.
Harken White Winch Grease is more or less repackaged generic white grease, and any proper marine-specific white grease will outperform it. Below that in the pecking order sits ordinary wheel bearing grease — sometimes called opal or blue grease — which will do in a genuine pinch if it’s the only thing on the boat, but isn’t designed for winch use and tends to turn to cack inside the housing over time. It’s not a recommendation, just an honest acknowledgment that it’s better than nothing.
Cleaning: The Tongue Test
The standard for clean, put simply: clean enough that you’d be comfortable giving it a lick. That’s not a joke — any leftover black residue on gears and internals isn’t just cosmetic. That colour comes from dirt, grime, and metal particles suspended in old grease, and if it stays in place it becomes a grinding paste. A grinding paste inside a winch does exactly what it sounds like: it wears the gears down from the inside, which is where most premature winch wear actually comes from, not from the mechanism itself failing.
It’s also why race winches get serviced far more often — daily, in some programmes — because they’re spinning constantly and fast, generating far more of that particulate build-up in the grease. Clean grease without particles in it doesn’t grind anything away, and it lets the winch spin more freely into the bargain.
While reassembling, it’s worth checking the gear sets and pawls for wear patterns — the pawls only ride on part of a gear’s full depth, so flipping components to present a fresh, unworn surface each service spreads the wear more evenly over the component’s life rather than concentrating it in one spot every time.
Reassembly and Keeping It That Way
One small diagnostic worth knowing: a groove worn into a thrust washer isn’t always current damage. In this case it dated back to the previous owner reassembling the winch incorrectly at some point — worth checking, since it changes whether a worn part needs replacing now or was already stable.
A genuinely useful habit for reassembly: photograph every step as you take the winch apart. It becomes a reverse assembly manual by the time you’re putting it back together, and it’s particularly valuable on a winch type or brand you don’t service often.
On the exterior, a light smear over the tower housing helps keep green corrosion at bay without inviting the dirt build-up some people worry a greased exterior will attract. In practice, a winch serviced often enough sheds that dirt without issue, even somewhere with plenty of grubby rain to contend with. The bigger factor is frequency of service, not how much you protect the outside between services.
These are expensive pieces of hardware, and they reward the attention. A winch that’s kept clean and serviced on schedule is also, simply, a nicer thing to work on when service time rolls around — less concrete, more satisfaction.
If you haven’t seen the free rigging content yet, the Sails and Mast cornerstones are a good place to start. For more information on sailing preparation see our Performance Sailing Hub.