I only have experience with a few windlasses, and usually power down, but I have not had a problem veering chain rapidly when I needed to get the hook on the bottom quickly. The Ideal windlass on Seahorse is very easy to regulate with the clutch. So is the Lofrans Falkon on the sailboat. But the brake is not used in these operations. The clutch is backed off until the anchor begins to fall, and then the speed is adjusted by "feathering" the clutch. This is easy to acquire a feel for, and the speed can be finely regulated. On both these machines, the brake is simply used to hold the (anchor) load while the other wildcat (or the gypsy) is used for another purpose, and is not intended as a speed control in "free-fall." However, it sounds as though not all windlasses work this way. Regards, John "Seahorse" Reply to: John@Camm.us Wayne writes: Our old sailboat had an all-chain rode as well as a chain & nylon rode. It also had a Maxwell vertical windlass that I dearly loved. It had a chain gypsy as well as a rope capstan. I had always ran it power-in and power-out. I timed power-out so as to determine exactly how much chain was out. (It also had markers, but I often missed them.) One day, when anchoring out in the Gulf of Mexico in about 40' of water, I thought that it would take too long to power out so much chain, so I decided to let it free-fall. I had to completely loosen the brake to get the anchor off the roller, in order to start the free-fall. BIG MISTAKE! I knew that the chain would run fast, but had no idea that it would be THAT fast! The anchor was a 45# CQR with 3/8" chain. It almost instantly started running out so fast that the chain made a large arc from the windlass to the water, running about half a foot above the bow roller. The noise was horrific! I was almost afraid to get near it, but knew that when the end of the chain jerked on the well-secured I-bolt, it would probably still pull the I-bolt out of the bulkhead, or worse. The windlass brake was supposed to be operated with a winch handle, but I usually simply operated the brake by hand. The winch handle was several feet away, so without pausing further, I started braking the windlass and finally got it to stop - with about 30-40' (as I recall) of the 280' of chain left in the locker. That was the last time I ever let it free-fall, except when checking it once at the dock and started with the brake set and powering out until the anchor was resting on the bottom. (The brake provided friction/braking action between the windlass shaft and the gypsy, not to the base of the windlass itself, so that a locked brake simply meant that the rotation of the gypsy was controlled by the motor/shaft.) It was amazing how fast the chain still ran out in just 8' of water - and the chain was stored below the waterline! It is obvious, that a continuous brake-controlled free-fall would have been much safer, but I simply did not expect the chain to run so quickly and had not set up the windlass with the winch handle and had not powered the rode out sufficiently to get the anchor off of the bow roller so I could then control the rate of chain deployment. The brake is a cone that is pressed into a matching piece by operation of the brake control. The brake control is a large screw mechanism that is actuated by turning to top surface of the windlass. The winch handle is inserted into a receptacle at the center of the windlass's top surface in order to get more leverage to screw the cone into its mating piece. The two parts are very smoothly machined and are greased. The brake is actually very effective while being very simple. Any wear and tear that might be saved on the motor brushes and/or gear train was more than compensated for by wear and tear on the rest of the windlass - and my nerves.