C'est la Vie is a 1966 Charlie Morgan 34.

Her home port is Everglades City, FL. Our typical cruising area is Southwest Florida, the Florida Keys, the Southeastern Atlantic Seaboard, and the Bahamas. We are C'est la Vie's third owners and purchased her in 2005. We continue to maintain and update this classic vessel. Please post any questions or comments about C'est la Vie or our travels via the comment links below.


Saturday, September 24, 2011

Nothing left but to re-install the refinished windlass

Thanks to a great deal of assistance from friends and family our Sea Tiger 555 windlass is completely restored.
Bud assisted me with removing the windlass.  Here is the starting point...
 I struggled to disassemble the windlass so a local friend took the windlass the his workplace, a local Naval Yard.  The assembled windlass returned it looking like this...
I then transported the windlass to my family's home and with more help from Bud we stripped down the windlass into its component parts. Degreasing and inspecting the mechanism we relaized one spring was missing, a couple bolts were nearly stripped, and all the o-rings required replacing.
 I located SL Spares, a UK based vendor that supplies replacement parts, via the internet.  The new parts arrived as ordered from the UK in under 2 weeks.  Bud took on reassembling, priming, and applying the finish paint.  The Lovett's are in town visiting for a day and delivered the windlass.
 All that remains is adding some additional grease and bolting the windlass back to the deck.

More images and comments on this project can be found in our photo album: Refinish Windlass - 2011

Thanks for all the help to everyone that pitched in on this project.

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