Most sailing vessels are equipped with self-tailing winches. The bigger the winches are, the more powerful they are.
So what is better than big self-tailing winches?
 
Electric winches, of course!

I had been planning to install electric winches for a couple of years. This is an expensive project. I came across a great deal for electric winches made by Antal in Italy. I bought a pair of their 52ST winches, sight unseen in 2005. My plan was to replace the original
Lewmar 52ST winches     with the Antal winches.
   

I learned that this was much easier said than done. Some times, size does matter and it sure is nice to have big winches. However, the Antal turned out to be too big because the available space below the winch pad does not accommodate the vertically mounted motor, which you find on almost all electric winches.
 
I did have a couple of people come to the boat and look into this problem. The result always was that there would be not enough room for the motor. Siltala, the mother yard, would not offer any suggestions, either. Thus, my beautiful Antal winches sat in the basement collecting dust. I finally sold them on eBay.

Meantime, I kept looking around for alternatives. My rigger was one of the people who looked into this and the only suggestion he came-up with were Andersen Electric Compact winches. Just look at the Andersen prices! At US$15,000 for the pair, they are a real turn-off!

A friend of mine put me on to Arco winches, now Arco-Hutton or just Hutton, an Australian company. Their web site is www.huttonwinches.com
Hutton manufactures self-tailing electric winches, which can be fitted with a compact, small diameter vertical 850W motor.

I started corresponding with Allen Hutton, the owner. He provided me with lots of good technical and electrical information. I ordered 2 of their 56STC winches. Allen had suggested their size 60 but 56 is all I can fit on the pad.
I paid a lot less than what the other winches would have cost me!

The installation was simple and straight forward. Yet, very time-consuming. Most of the time was spent on cutting the
3 inch motor access holes in the winch pads and wiring the winches. To simplify the electrical wiring, I did install a remotely charged battery in the cockpit. The winch pads are made of 10mm (about 1/2 inch) thick steel plates and they are glassed-in. It takes lots of time and patience to drill the holes and tap the bolt threads.

A picture is worth a thousand words! The installation sequence is shown in the thumbnail photos here below.
Click on each photo to see a larger view.