Hi Dog Ship,
You were almost right, but what you said prompted me to remove the two little plastic plugs, by screwing a self tapper into them and pulling with a claw hammer. There is no allan key, only a hole giving access to the ball bearings, (which are either Delrin or Torlon—some sort of plastic material).
I will give a little background for those who might be interested:
This furler is for my foremast staysail, (Brigantine schooner), and I wanted to utilize a long turnbuckle top stud—which cost an arm and a leg—to carry the gooseneck of the staysail boom. The thread sizes were different and left handed, between the Harken shaft, and the turnbuckle stud, and I couldn’t turn that on my lathe, so I turned the stud down to fit snug into the shaft and welded it to the shaft. I immediately knew something was wrong when the bearings started to smoke, but I didn’t for one moment think they would be made of plastic!!
Anyway, they melted themselves to the shaft, hence the stiffness in rotating.
This was last Friday night, and there is absolutely nothing on Harken’s site or anywhere else I could find on the web which explained how the inner shaft was fitted inside the one piece outer housing.
I removed the two ½” diameter “oiling plugs” which turned out not to be oiling plugs at all, but holes just big enough to pop the bearings in and out of their sockets.
These two pieces can be seen on the photo, including the “garden pea” bearings, 12 balls to each bearing.
The uppermost ring of bearings dropped out of the hole easily enough, but not the lower balls, which were fused to their grooves. These had to be individually drilled and waggled out of the hole, which took a total of three hours for twelve balls.
Then the last of these was out, the inner shaft came out of the outer housing to reveal all.
I damaged the inner bearing surface with the drilling, but nothing which can’t be cleaned up with my needle files.
So this is where we stand, and tomorrow I phone Harken to find out why the fitted plastic bearings on a headsail furler, instead of stainless balls, which I will probably use as replacements.
So I guess the moral is: “you live and learn” and that’s why I’ve taken the trouble to write this, to hopefully save someone else making the same mistakes.
