Harken Furler Ball Bearing Emergency
 

Help! Please!

My boat is supposed to go in the water in a week and I just made a huge error. This regards a Harken Mark III furler.

The rigger (who is not available right now) told me that I should wash the furler out with soapy water before I put the boat in the water because I'd done a lot of grinding on the foredeck and there was a lot of dust on the furler. I thought that he had said the ball bearings were captured and that I should pull the split ring off on the drum so that I could get water directly on the bearings.

Apparently that's not what he said, I guess the rest is obvious. I lost a lot of the lower race of ball bearings. I'm guessing there's 1/3 left in the furler, I have a bunch in a cup and I think I lost a fair amount over the side (can't find them because there's brown leaves all over the ground).

I was hoping the harken manual would show what to do but no dice.

I'm hoping that I can do this with the mast in place? I have a stay-loc at the bottom. Am I able to remove the bottom drum so that I can flip it over and put the bearings back?

Any advice? I'm supposed to go in the water in a week. There's unfortunately no one around who can do this for me at the moment. I ended up doing a fair amount of the rigging work on the mast, but didn't do anything with the furler. I'm pretty sure that if I backup the jibstay with halyards and then take out the turnbuckle I can slide the drum off and get the ball bearings back from the bottom side. Is that right? I believe there's a nut and a star ring I need to loosen to get everything off.

Talked to Harken today. The guy said to fill the lower race with shaving cream and then press in new ball bearings that way. Sounds like a plan.

for the record, shaving cream trick worked like a charm.

Yay Shaving Cream
 

Hello,
Ah, the "Harken Rain." That's right, what you experienced is so common that there is actually a term for it. Beware removing your traveler car for maintenance, unless it is the type with the captive bearings. Also damaged blocks, mast luff cars, or anything else with open races.
Oh, and be sure to apply one drop of One Drop to each race on your furler. Amazing stuff.
Fair leads,
Brion Toss

I'm glad I'm not the only dumdum.

Haha, Harken Rain ...

I'm sure I have this nice wooden tool somewhere that I made (for working on the traveler car on my catamaran) to keep the bearings in the car long enough to get them somewhere that they could be removed without losing any of them.

I'm currently working on reassembling a harken furler that my buddy mistakenly "disassembled" and experienced that very issue. This one is off the boat though, so reassembly is much easier.

My Levmar traveler came with a plastic track that is handy to keep for future disassembling / assembling of the car, it's designed so that you can easily put bearings back in.