Davit hydraulic failure & back,up?

Yesterday as I was raising our tender back on the top deck, a hydraulic hose burst in the stand pipe. Tender was left hanging about a foot up in the air over the chocks... Luckily we were at the dock. Davit is a QuickLift 1500 with cable up/down, boom up/down and rotation.

Then to make things interesting, the builder installed the aft deck outlet for th ice maker under the stand pipe and the fluid caused a short and some smoke before the breaker popped.

The ram controlling the cable always creep a bit and overnight the tender lowered itself on the chocks but I am wondering if there is a way to gently release pressure should this happen again for instance with the tender half up over the side. Looks like there are some safety valves in the ram. I ll ask the manufacturer on Monday but figured this is good food for thought as I ve always wondered about this but figured such failures are very rare. Now obviously I m thinking about having a back up. Had the failure happened 20 seconds earlier the tender woudl have been left hanging over the side. Not good.

Do other davits have an emergency attachment point to possibly rig a manual block or winch to at least lower the tender manually so the boat can get underway? Imagine being stuck in the middle of nowhere with a 1000lbs tender swinging off the side...

I pulled the slack out of the hose in stand pipe and sure enough the SS braid hose as burst. It s got quite a few rust spots which is odd for a 1 year old hose.

Right now the pump is under a settee on the aft deck, I'm thinking about relocating it up on the top deck in a fiberglass enclosure to reduce the hose run, make it more accessible and have a built in pan to catch any fluid spill.

Davit is being fixed now, that s one thing I like about quicklift is how they respond to service requests here in so fl. I ve only had a couple of issues with their davits over the year but they ve always been very easy to deal with.

Turned out the hose was defective, wrong grade of SS send by their supplier.

Anyway, I learned something today.. There is no safe way of slowly release pressure as the Pistons have locking valves built in. They said that 99% of the time it s the pressure hose that fails so one way to release pressure and drop the tender is to swap the pressure and return hose at the pump and at the davit and refill the reservoir. This will allow you to drop the tender back in t water although fluid will leak out of the return hose.

I am going to keep a back up hose on th boat just to be safe.

As a back up to a pump failure, I am going to make a shorter lifting harness for the tender and the jet ski. The shorter harness will leave space to hook up a block system so that the primary harness can be released and the tender or jetski manually lowered. Seems like an overkill but a failure in a remote location witht th tender in mid air means game over you can't even get underway with the dinghy dangling off the side.

This is why I posted this thread, I was hoping to get ideas and feedback on what others are doing or would do in case of a davit failure.

I know the odds of hydraulic failure in mid air are pretty low but it s always been in the back of my mind...

The only shortcoming of having a shorter harness and hooking up a manual back up (chain hoist or block system) is how to hook it up while the tender is half way up...

I believe they shut down the davit business. Most of the parts like pumps, cylinders etc are pretty much off the shelf so any good hydraulic shop should be able to handle it.

try contacting Danny, at Chock Master. Same family.

https://tenderchocks.com/