Pontos Winches Get 'Karverized'
by Diego Sosa, Upffront 14 Sep 2018 01:00 PDT
Pontos add an additional two gears in two different configurations © Pontos
Some exciting news this month from one of our favourite French deck hardware suppliers, Karver Systems, who acquired Pontos winches in February this year.
Pontos was another innovative start-up French company based on St Malo who brought their innovative four-speed winches to the market in 2012/2013. They dominated the media for the following 2-3 years, coming first in Yachting World's New Year's Top 10 (2013) and with feature articles in Yachting Monthly, Practical Boat Owner, Sail-World, Seahorse and Yachting World all of whom were impressed and wondering why no-one had done this before.
Most winches still just have two gears but Pontos add an additional two gears in one of two different configurations. The two extra gears are fully automatic (just keep reversing the direction) and can either be focussed on providing extra speed (Grinder) or extra power (Trimmer).
Yachting World summed it up in the January 2015 Gear Test: "How frustrating it would be to have a car with just two gears! Yet most sailors still rely on standard two-speed self-tailing winches... however... Pontos introduces four-speed winches that offer potentially the biggest advance in manual winch technology in a generation."
For innovative sailing hardware supplier Karver Systems, this is a logical progression.
Their obsession with high quality, simple, performance orientated products is very much in line with the Pontos philosophy and gives Karver the final key element to complete their deck hardware portfolio.
Karver are taking the opportunity with this acquisition to do a product revamp to take all the lessons from the first five years and upgrade the designs in terms of reliability and a number of performance improvement.
This new range of Karver / Pontos winches are expected to become available at the beginning of 2019. In the meantime, however, there is a reasonable stock of existing Pontos winches available to buy and Karver intends to maintain stock of spares for service and maintenance of all existing Pontos customers worldwide.
We are busy doing the "upffront" work to get the Pontos winch range up on the website and we will notify you when both the existing Pontos and the new range of "Karverized" winches are available to buy online.
If you have any questions or would like to talk to us about winches for your boat, please get in touch with us.