One of my anchor customers asked me this and I really couldn't answer. It is common practice on smaller boats to back off the windlass a little after the anchor is brought up and secured. The general idea being that maintaining the load on the bearings will increase wear. The shaft bearings are usually either rollers or a double row ball bearing on a bronze or stainless shaft.
Is this true or just an old sailors tale?
Possible plastic deformation over time???? Gerry :-)} London, Canada
What if the force on the bearing surface - point contacts or line contacts allow salt water to attack the metal rather than be coated with grease.
Might have some bearing on the subject :-)
Martin
If antifriction bearings (ball or roller) are subject to any vibration or very small relative motion without actually rotating, they will develop false brinelling where the rolling elements meet the races. I am most familiar with this problem in the shipping of electric motors. They can leave the factory with smooth ,quiet bearigs and arrive at the other end of a cross country road trip with noisy bearings. The solution on larger motors is to add a shipping brace on the shaft end to preload the bearings and prevent any relative motion. In your case, I suspect backing off the windlass can prevent vibrations from being transmitted to the windlass bearings so there may be some basis for the practice.
Mill
It's good practice. On larger vessels the anchor is secured with the strain off the anchor hoist to a padeye via a pellican hook. The same kind of thinking when you take a valve part of a turn off it's backseat.
I was taught to always backseat such a valve between finger tight and hand tight.
Yours,
Doug Goncz, Replikon Research, Seven Corners, VA
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Large marine engines are "prelubed" with an electric driven oil pump for a ten or so minutes prior to lighting them off. The crankshaft is heavy enough that the oil will be squeezed out of the main bearings. Without prelube, the bearings would be trashed before normal engine oil got there. Perhaps this is the reason that the load is taken off the windlass -- to keep the lubricants from being squeezed out of the geartrain and bearings. John
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