Friday, March 20, 2009

Installing a Capstan on Nordic Star





























I installed a bow mounted capstan to ease the anchor recovery. It is also very handy for raising the mainsail and being hoisted aloft. The capstan is a Lewmar C-3 purchased from PYacht. The kit including circuit breaker, capstan and waterproof foot switch is Lewmar part number 6960056. The data sheet for the capstan can be seen on Lewmar's website: http://en.lewmar.com/products/catalog/1-17.pdf


This model has an in-line gear box and is fairly compact. Using a supplied template a hole was cut in the deck aft of the stem fitting. I cleaned out the balsa core around the edge of the hole and filled it with fiberglass cloth and resin. The edge of the hole was finished off by applying structural epoxy filler. The deck has to be reinforced because the capstan attaches to the deck by clamping mounting pieces from below against the underside of the capstan. A shim also had to be fabricated from fiber glass and resin to provide a flat mounting surface for the capstan due to the J/30 deck crown. The forward edge of the capstan base is 17" aft of the stem fitting. Excuse my teak toe rail, it is scheduled for extinction. The aft edge of the foot switch is 10" forward of the anchor locker.


Because of the length of the wire runs from the battery ( 25 feet ) I used 2 gauge wire routed along the port underside of the deck up into the bow locker. The deck switch was located on the starboard deck forward of the anchor well. In one of the shots you can see the capstan's #10 gauge pigtails that were connected to insulated posts nearby.







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