Thus saith the Admiral, after servicing seven of our nine winches.
On our last sailing segment, we noticed part of a spring was sticking out of one of our main Harken 53.2st’s:
…and this reminded us that we probably ought to service our winches. A short trip to Harken’s web site landed us schematics, which is good, because otherwise this would just seem like a big pile of parts, mostly alike:
Fortunately, this did not daunt our technician, who seems to still be enjoying herself at this phase of the project:
Two days later, seven of our nine winches had fallen to the crazed toothbrush wielding crew. Much insight was had and general admiration of Harken construction was obtained. The spring turned out to just be a little lost and re-entered duty in the same winch. In sympathy vibration, one of the other winches turned out to be missing this same spring and we found two worn o-rings that we can probably pick up at a local hardware store. Not bad given that these things probably hadn’t been serviced since they were installed in 1999.
The only lose, and the source of this entry’s pithy title, were the Harken 40.2st’s which don’t allow you to get to the internal set of bearing rings and pawls unless you want to entirely remove the winch from the bulkhead. One quick look at the bedding down below persuaded us that we had better things to do with our time. And given the general good health of all of the other bearings and pawls, probably unnecessary. We squirted some white lithium grease in there and called it done.
A public service rant.
We ordered an immense amount of stuff last fall before moving onto the boat. And unsurprisingly, quite a lot of it was Made in China. The outdoor brass Master locks, now outsourced. The Polder meat thermometer. The West Bend electronic timer. The Kensington 12v power supply. The list goes on and on. But the theme that’s resonating here is that most of this stuff it utter garbage. Some of it we just plain threw out on delivery, it was so bad. With postal rates through the roof right now, what’s the point of paying $10 to return a $15 part?
For example, here’s what our brand new West Bend timer looks like today:
The disease has been slowly eating away segments from right to left.
We use a Polder meat thermometer to smoke pork shoulder. The key to good BBQ is temperature management, “low and slow” as they say in NC. Our old Polder can alarm on high or low and so you just dial in 165-190 and keep feeding your favorite charcoal until it’s done. But the older model also came with a UI that was positively Mandarin. Even after we’d taped instructions on how to program it to the back we were still unable to figure it out half the time. So perhaps that explains why we decided to try a new one for the boat. Bad move.
Lose #1: the new and improved Polder has eliminated the low temperature alarm. Yes, this does simplify the UI.
Lose #2: about 30 minutes into the first grilling, the temperature jumped from 72 to “hi”, alarmed, and stayed there. That was the end of it. A quick check of reviews on Amazon, Epicurious, and a few other cooking sites show that this is happening, *a lot*. Apparently in addition to “improving” the base unit by removing the low temperature alarm, Polder improved the probe so that it permanently fails above 72 degrees. Chinese innovation.
Today, we discovered that the brand new brass outdoor Master lock that’s securing our dinghy is severely corroded. We only installed this right before we left Oriental. So it’s been outside about two weeks. It looks like it’s in danger of seizing up at any time. It took a half hour of soaking in WD40 to get it open.
The new $30 mini-mag LED flashlight. Worked for about a month. Now it only works when you actively shake it.
The Kensington power supply. Worked for less than a week. They kindly replaced it.
Or how about the 3M “Dry Erase Board” which turned out to be a fickin’ piece of cardboard with white paper glued to the cardboard? I don’t even want to think about how many pennies we overpaid for that.
Or the brass pipe fitting to hook up a garden hose to our cockpit shower, which turned out to be the inverse of the NPT to garden hose threading we ordered.
Or the LPG pressure meter that leaked LPG out of its plastic (!) fittings like a sieve. That one was made in India.
Or the three black pepper mills which kept showing up white with big letter “S”’s stamped on their side.
Or the yachting watch where the date dial would not budge. I guess that’s why it was on sale.
Or the pedal on the Montague bike that spontaneously stripped itself after one day of use.
Or the allen wrench set we bought from Sears which must have been made out of some metal softer than aluminum.
Or the Revere plastic mixing bowl set where the lids split after about a month of use.
Or the super high-test shackles which showed up stamped, “Made in China” and already rusting. We returned those.
Or the chrome paper towel holder that started rusting after about two weeks. We weren’t even in the water yet!
To say that we have a quality problem in the United States would be a gross understatement. And about the only thing that’s going to fix this is for all of us to start sending this crap back and demand our money back. So instead of just tossing that $15 timer, we dug out our Amazon receipt and told West Bend we wanted them to fix the poor thing. West Bend turns out to be but a brand now owned by some company called Focus, but their customer support is sending us a new one free of charge. A small victory to be sure, but a satisfying one nonetheless.
Watch out Mag Lite, you’re next!
