Roller Furler Lower Drum!
I know, don’t get too excited. 😉
Jereme could hardly contain his excitement when the new drum arrived and, with the flick of a finger, so effortlessly spun, and spun, and spun. Versus our old drum that literally wouldn’t even spin. If you’ve ever replaced a drum with corroded ball bearings, then you know what I’m talking about.
^^you can kinda sorta see the ball bearings inside of the old drum.^^
Let me back up just a hair.
As you might have noticed by now, our boat came equipped with a roller furling genoa sail (that was approximately 9 years old). However, we quickly realized after purchasing the boat that the drum would need to be serviced.
If you aren’t familiar with sailing, a roller furler is a way to bring out the front sail without needing to hoist a sail. In other words, the sail is already up, and is rolled or wrapped around the forestay (the metal wire that holds up the mast). So when you want the sail out, you unroll it, and vice versa to put it away. An added bonus with the furler is that you can control all of the sail unrolling action from the boat’s cockpit with the jib sheets and furling line. The furler drum (with ball bearings inside) controls the spinning motion around the forestay.
Okay, so our roller furler, a Schaefer 2100, is a pretty standard model. The original Schaefers were designed with a lower drum that has ball bearings in it, but NO ability to be flushed out. Without the ability to flush the drum, the bearings in the lower drum will corrode from salt water/spray over the course of several years. After corrosion has happened, the only good way to roll in the sail (for us) was to go up to the bow of the boat and manually (by hand) turn the whole system to get the jib to roll back in.
Jereme did a little research, and figured out that Schaefer Marine was well-aware of the corrosion problem on the old model, and they have since redesigned the drum to include a flushing hole to combat the issue. As such, we knew we would need to replace the drum and not merely “service” it. However, we would not need to replace the entire furler (which is great news). The new lower drum was $180 (versus several thousand for a complete new roller furler system).
^^note the new drum with the much-needed flushing hole.^^
Jereme purchased our new lower drum directly from Schaefer Marine, who shipped it to us along with a nice little instruction booklet. The booklet included 45+ steps on how to install an entire roller furler, but all Jereme really needed was the specific instructions on the lower drum install. So, he basically just jumped in head first and took things apart. 😉
One key element (i.e. the worst part) of this process was removing/reattaching the forestay. (Once you have the forestay detached, removing the old lower drum and slipping on the new one is super easy.) Jereme tried 10+ times to reattach the forestay, by himself. …Not an easy solo feat. It was super difficult to realign the forestay with the fitting holes AND insert the pin to secure the forestay. Mostly because you really do need another person to help keep things aligned while inserting the pin (and I wasn’t there to help that day). But leave it to Jereme to get the job done anyways! He’s got mad skills.
I showed up the next day to help with the final (easy) steps of the install. After everything was installed and back in place, all we had left to do was put the jib sail back on! I think we can safely cross this one off the boat project list! 🙂
>>Thanks for visiting LAHOWIND sailing blog! We’d love for you to get to know us and follow our story as we attempt to navigate a whole new world of sailing.
Wow! A boat project that actually went smoothly as planned. A rarity in the would of sailing. Murphy must have been asleep that day.
All the best,
Mark and Cindy
s/v Cream Puff