During the J/30 NAs on Mondial both pawls tore out of their respective pawl pockets on our starboard secondary winch, a Barient 21 pre-1983. Being recently out of college and on my own, I was hoping to avoid having to purchase either a shiny new $1,200 dollar winch, or more reasonably, about $200 for a used replacement. I contacted Chris Kopecky of Morse Fabrications to see if he could weld in new aluminum into the winch drum so that pawls would once again be held in the pawl pockets correctly. This will probably not be a permanent repair, but I believe it should give quite a few more years of service now.

One thing I did learn from this was that the new Harken pawls we installed are about a tenth of an inch to short to properly engage the Mainshaft Ratchet Gear and I believe that may have accelerated our particular failure mode. I provided Chris with the winch and a pawl to measure the appropriate length of material. I was incredibly surprised with how quick they turned the project around, I dropped off the winches on a Thursday, and by Saturday of that week they had finished it.

The pawl pockets did need some cleanup work in the end, they added on extra material (much preferable to too little) and I merely had to file down the extra until the pawl could turn enough to let Mainshaft rotate past when turned in the low-speed high-torque 30:1 mode. Chris charged me the princely sum of $40 for somewhere between a half to a full hour of work, which I augmented with a good bottle of red wine. I was able to put the winch back together correctly tonight and I am extremely pleased to say that the winch runs beautifully now. I highly recommend Morse for this type of work, it should help those of us still with Barient winches to keep them in service for a while longer. You can contact Chris at:

Morse Fabrications
Chris Kopecky
(410) 437-5534
morsefab@msn.com
7578 Solley Road, Glen Burnie, MD 21060