Harken Furler Ball Bearing Emergency

[sully75]

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.