Boldstep
Or how a single phone call from Artemis during AC35 in Bermuda set off a bumpy but ultimately fruitful chain of development…
The E-Blackstar project Along the dockside people had begun to ask us when they were going to see the first winch from Stayinphase. A good few years ago our friend and project manager Ben Wright had said to me, ‘You don’t want to just build a better cuckoo clock, Jon. There has to be a better way… that’s what people are waiting for!’ My response was always the same: it’s ‘coming soon, we’re working on it, stand by’. However, while I had some loose
concepts and directions in my mind, significant challenges in design and resources prevented me going forward as quickly as I hoped. I did not feel I had the depth and combination of design concepts and resources in place to bring reality to these ideas. But by 2015 things had progressed within our company sufficiently that I began to have the confidence to begin such a project. Little did I know what lay ahead… Soon afterwards, during an informal
meeting over coffee in Valencia with design engineer Antoine Delaperriere, I discovered that my old friend had considerable experience in the development of rapid-shifting gearboxes in the motorsport sector; so after throwing ideas around we decided to work together on a new winch. Things were beginning to fall into place as we embarked upon some pretty blue-sky thinking sessions and arrived at a couple of basic concepts to explore further. We were off and running at last. But it seemed that no sooner had
we started to lay down our ideas than the phone rang from Bermuda, where onboard things didn’t seem to be going so well for a couple of
74 SEAHORSE
the teams. We were tasked to study system performance issues on their AC50s and propose solutions. Fairly quickly I suspected that the level of improvement being sought would be hard to find with some of their current hardware. Thinking about a winch specific to the AC50 began to make sense… February 2016, the Blackstar-I project was born.
BLACKSTAR-I From 2000 onwards I then worked with Volvo and AC teams to push development of winch transmissions. By 2010 I was ready to get away from chasing my tail, endlessly brushing grease onto gears every night and replacing knackered bearings and gears. Mind-numbing stuff. Fast-forward to 2014 and,
inspired by things now running more smoothly below deck, we wanted to close the loop by bringing the same approach to lubrication into the winches themselves. Our vision: completely sealed
winch internals, opening up new possibilities for material choices and systems not seen before on a yacht. Unsurprisingly, this is where things started to get challenging. And there’s a reason this hadn’t
been attempted before: ‘We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard’ – John F Kennedy. Blackstar-I was a single speed
winch concept designed specifically for AC50 cats. A basic arrangement of offset parallel spur gears for the input first stage allowed us to alter the ratios to suit wind speed, as had
Above: the AC50 of SoftBank Team Japan at speed on the Great Sound in Bermuda. SoftBank was one of the two teams whose requests for technical support at the last America’s Cup finally prompted Jon Williams to take a fresh look at winch lubrication and in turn efficiency. The need to allow crews to do more sailing and less pumping at AC36 was one of the few things to be universally agreed upon when the boat concept that became the AC75 was first being dreamt up
become desirable on these boats. This was coupled to a planetary gear set with the annular ring gear in the winch drum. We studied possible gearing layouts and elected to go for an epicyclical (planetary) arrangement that offered a balanced compact arrangement with good stability and power. A high-performance alloy steel
used extensively in gearboxes in the motorsport industry was introduced for the new gears themselves. This ‘new’ grade steel allowed us to design our gears with aggressively small face widths, reaching levels of surface hardness unobtainable with standard stainless-steel parts. Precision thin-section ball bearing
races kept the drum where it should be, not floating around, but securely held concentric with the main carrier and gears in mesh. Antoine then introduced a small ‘gerotor’ (generated rotor) pump to the design which was driven by the main input shaft – as far as we were aware we were now looking at the first continually lubricated and sealed yacht winch. But nothing ventured nothing
gained and we had soon received the backing of both Artemis and SoftBank, for whom we built a total of four winches during the 2017 Cup. Given their faith in us we were therefore understandably relieved when early bench sessions showed the new winch design was providing close to 10 per cent higher efficiency (using a single ratio). So not inconsequential at this level. This all sounds fine so far, but
once saltwater comes into the equation things can go wrong very
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