What is a winch in 100 words
A winch’s function is that of a lever: it aids human force at pulling very high loads.
The chain of elements involved in the functioning of all winches starts with the winch handle and the human hand that turns it. Rotation is thus transferred via the ceter rod to the gear section. The gear section modifies the power ratio and finally transfers the new ratio to the drum. On the drum, slowly and powerfully, the line winds up. The winch is a winch because it tranforms rotational speed into power to the advantage of the human arm.
The chain of parts is the same in every winch. What else may distinguish winches, then? Besides sheer mechanics, there are at least two other aspects that build up a winch quality. First, its inherent characteristics and, second, innovation.
Materials
Each part and each movement of the parts ultimately relies on the inherent properties (of materials and their workmanship). When quality is set as finanl goal of design, choices always fall on the quality of materials and finishings. Parts and moving systems must be strong and light, not strong and heavy, or cheap and light. Differences inside Antal winches may thus be found in: high quality roller bearings, CNC machined aluminum parts, high-resistance alloy toothed crown gears, low friction axels treatments, differentiated drum knurling. Find more information about this just below.
Innovation
A second aspect of the quality of winch production is that a product is created entirely in house. Every winch is the result of a process that goes from designing to testing, and thus from machining to assembling: all in the same place. Overviewing so closely the life of our products allows to do something very important, ie cross family imporovements. When improving an element of one model we immediately extend the same improvement to the entire family. As a result the entire production of winches gains in quality from the use and experience we gain, immediately. We insist that this is the greater part of the quality of XT winches: don’t we all expect that every winch size receives from other similar products the hints for innovation?
Models available
Manual XT winches are available both in the aluminum version and in the chromed version. Powered winches are also available in both finishings, aluminum and chrome. Moreover motors can be electric horizontal, vertical or hydraulic. The XT winch family includes top performing Race winches, lighter and stronger.
We propose at the page Short guide to how to choose a winch a table to select winch power based either on boat length or sail surface.