Nigel's advice is good, do some fault finding, it could save you a heap of money. My windlass is a Lofrans Cayman which had also worked hard during the boats early life as a charter vessel. Not long after I bought the boat the windlass stopped working. The fault turned out to be the original control cables (the ones used to tell the windlass which way you want it to run) were so badly corroded on account of them being ordinary cooper wire rather than tinned copper wire, that the signal was not reaching the solenoid. Firstly I ran a set of cables, just some ordinary household wire, temporarily across the deck and through one of the hatches to the solenoid control terminals after disconnecting the original control cables, and the initial problem was solved. The solenoid was still in working order, as also was the windlass, and now that it was receiving proper direction signals the windlass would run happily. All that was left was to remove the old control cables and lay in new tinned copper cables out of sight behind the interior furniture. Not an easy job, and particularly difficult negotiating past the chain locker bulkhead on a B36(2002), but once done I had a working windlass but only for the cost of some new signal cables and the time I spent laying them in. The cables had a cross section area of something like 2 square mm., and were quite cheap to buy through eBay. The original ordinary copper signal wires had corroded and had turned black throughout their entire length.
