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 4 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 2 gears but Pontos add an additional 2 gears in one of two different configurations. The two extra gears are fully automatic (just keep reversing the direction) can either be focussed on providing extra Speed (Grinder) or extra power (Trimmer).
Trimmer – Double the effective power of an equivalent sized winch (Pictured Right)
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 5 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 about manual winches, please feel free to email us at support@upffront.com, or click the link below to see our full range: