We have a Nemo brand jib furler on Paikea. It is the original one that came with the old mast. When we built our carbon rotating mast we retrofitted the existing stainless steel wire stays from our aluminum mast to our new rig. We did this for 2 reasons. the first being that we had already purchased new side stays and a forestay less than 12 months earlier – it seemed a waste to go and replace perfectly good wire stays so soon after we had bought them, and secondly, well, we didn’t have the cash for new synthetic ones!
The attachment points we made on our carbon rig will allow for the rotation in the mast and we can easily replace the wire stays with synthetic ones once the life span of our wire ones expire. If you would like to see the mast connection points in more detail please consider joining our membership program. On our membership site, we have details on many of the projects featured on our YouTube channel.
But I digress, the point is that we still have the wires from our original mast along with the jib furling unit on the forestay. The furling unit on Paikea, is much older than our wires, however. It must be the original that came with the boat as the examples I tried to find to feature on our boat systems page are much newer than ours. The point is that it’s old and the head swivel part ceased up on us recently. Upon further inspection, it turned out that the ball bearings in the top of the swivel unit were destroyed. They were broken and squashed and meant that our furling unit could not spin freely.
So we thought we would film the process for you all to see. The main things to be aware of are clean the area around the grub screw before you spray any lubrication into the hole – you don’t want to create a muddy mess. Buy and use good tools whenever you can. If you have any type of catamaran it will be weight sensitive, you won’t be able to fill up your boat with all the tools you would like so choose carefully. The guys at Wera make quality products and we have a link to the tools we use on our boat systems page. Just make sure that you use the right tool for the job otherwise you end up filming the rest of your project wearing a Disney Princesses band-aide (much to your son’s delight).
Once you have removed the grub screw carefully you will need to undo the head swivel in order to access the ball bearings. This proved a little more tricky for us. We used the c spanner from our project servicing the hydraulic steering rams and a large pipe wrench to pull the head swivel apart. Be careful not to scratch or bruise your gear as this will speed up any corrosion on your parts.
After that, the hardest part was paying Island prices in the Caribbean for new replacement Torlon Ball Bearings. We replaced both the top and bottom swivel ball bearings. The newly serviced furler now works a treat.
Next project? Better sort that headsail out….