As we can't add pix to an existing thread we didn't start, I'll start another one, but this for for a glass boat. Glass boats,particularly older ones in the 5-6metre range, can be really difficult to do a good job on due to the shapes of the narrow gunwhales and coamings--by comparison, any ali boat is a piece of cake. I have seen some really horrible instals on glass boats--gunwhales hacked, or bloody great brackets over the gunwhales to mount them inside, so you are banging into them all the time. 

I looked at the Dommi for a long time, and had the advantage of having a fellow Dommi owner just up the road with one mounted. His, frankly, is horrible, involving cutting big holes in the glass and lifting it up to clear the top coaming on a big wooden block. My original plan involved fabbing up a ply box, heavily glassed, then glassed to the boat permanently. problem with this is that I don't want it in the way for at least 6 months of the year, and doing a good, aesthetically pleasing glassing job to fix the box to the boat is not easy. Nor did I want to weaken the side of the boat bu cutting big holes.

So I fabbed up the box from 12mm marine ply  , and glassed it with three-four laminations . The winch is secured by 3 8mm studs--I needed to source some s/s M8 threaded rod as 2 of the original studs were too short. I could actually fit the winch inside the box with minimal clearance underneath without doing a gunwhale cutout, at perfect height to match the tipper roller, meaning I only needed four holes through the gunwhale--3 x 10mm for the winch studs, and a 20mm hole for the cable. So why the hell do I need to glass the box on? It was a neat fit around the countours of the gunwhale already, so I made it better by laying some body filler onto the edges, Inox on the hull as a release agent, then, hey presto, a perfect fit. Trimmed it up and gelcoated. The studs are actually taking the pull, particularly the 2 outer ones, and the box is really being compressed under load. The two outers run through a 6mm ali plate to spread the load.

So I ended up with a very tidy setup, held by three studs with nylocs--literally a 5 minute job with a socket and ratchet to get them off, lift the winch, disconnect the cables, plug the holes with ss bolts, and it is gone until next whites.

For controls, i couldn't see a good way of using the foot switch supplied--these are great on the foredeck of a big boat, retrieving the anchor, but I didn't want to mount it in the deck, or have to wedge myself hard against the side of the boat, against the roll, if it were mounted inside the gunwhales. That could be a very stop-start bit of winching, spitting catch out the neck each time it stopped. I wanted to use a solenoid for control, to cut down the length of cable run battery to winch. Power is supplied straight from the Aux power isolator to a 80amp waterproof breaker, then isolator, then solenoid. All this is mounted up under the outboard well, out off sight and most splashing. The solenoid is switched by one of those Narva isolators with the removal key, mounted out of the way , but right where you need it--key is removed when not in use, so it can't be snagged or turned on accidentally if the isolator is left on. Bottom picture is with the key removed. Key cannot fall out when it is in the on position.

Mattdee's tipper is mounted on the other side--too early up here yet for any real crays, which is a good thing as my gearbox upper oil seal has sprung a leak and I'm waiting on parts before I put pots in the water. Maybe end of this coming week, with any luck.

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