Steering

I think I touched on this in an earlier post.  Sorry if I am repeating myself.

I had planned on using cable steering for Teleflex (SeaStar), and so steamed off in that direction and had a keyway cut in the rudder shaft for the tillar such that the tillar arm was low down on the shaft.  My intention had been to feed the steering cable under the stringer and use the stringer to secure the cable.

Then the opportunity came to get Hydraulic steering as "payment" for some engineering work.  The steering comes from Ultraflex (it wasn't them or their agents I was working for).  They have steering setups for inboards and outboards.  The steering for inboards is a fairly traditional hydraulic cylinder secured at one end.  The end of the ram is them secured to the tillar.  This setup makes for quite a long bit of kit.  With the way my tillar was fitted, ie pointing fore / aft I plain couldn't get this to work.  Had I not already fitted the tillar I could have had the key way machined such that the tillar arm pointed athwart ship and then the ram could have run fore / aft.

So then I started looking at the outboard steering setups.  It took a couple of goes and some thinking, but I became convinced that this would work.  I drew it all up in CAD and moved things around and the angles seemed to work.  I suggested this to the Steering supplier but they could see how I could make it work.  Not to be deterred I went ahead and ordered a full system of "Outboard" hydraulic. steering.

By this time the only thing I wasn't sure off was exactly how I was going to mount the ram to the boat.

Here is mock up number 1.

Bit of an aerial shot of the setup.  As I have mentioned elsewhere I mockup my brackets with ply before getting them laser cut out of 316 SS. The Ram is only in generally the right place here.  You can see I had to extend the tillar arm a little to make the maths work

The thing I didn't like about this solution was once the RAM was in places, it was going to be difficult to make any form of adjustment.

I also had interference issues, hence the Z shaped bracket.

I did find pictures of someone else who had used this approach, but I wasn't happy with it.  Then I had this idea. The black "horns" came with the RAM. When mounted on an outboard they have some spacer to match the width of the outboards steering tube.  It basically make the setup almost identical to an outboard.  The threaded rod gives me pretty much infinte adjustment.

Here is they finished install. You'll note the Ram is a bit closer to the tillar.  I had the stainless tillar extension cut and then when checking my maths later I decided it was the wrong length / holes in the wrong place.  I spent three days going around in circles before ending up 1mm from where I started.

Update on the strut / shaft hole issue

While investigating the issue with the placement of the strut and shaft hole, I also discovered the water intake is completely in the wrong place.  I tried to get it out with the intention of relocating it, but after about 5 minutes of bashing the hell out of it with a rubber mallet and finding it was just laughing at me, I have for the time being given up on that, and worst case I will just put a blank cap on it.

So after reviewing the maths etc I have come to the conclusion I will have to move the strut and re drill the shaft hole.  The was quite a physiological blow, and I have to confess visions of a chainsaw swam into the recesses of my mind.  Anyway shook all that off and made the first decision, which was do I turn it back over to deal with it, or jack it up on blocks and deal with it with the hull the right way up.  Upside down has appeal because it gives more working space and gravity is on your side, but the cons are building another frame to support it and assembling 20 odd bodies to do the lifting an flipping, and then getting them all back a month later to turn it over again.

So in the end I elected to do it with the hull the right way up so I jacked the boat back up on blocks to give me about 450mm of working room underneath and took a look at the problem.

In the case of the shaft hole I routered a flat about 180mm long by 90mm wide and glued a 4mm piece of ply into it.  The photo below was just after gluing, the piece of timber coning down is just a brace to hold it while the glue sets.

I have already since shaped it with sander and done some filling, its pretty close to fair.  Then I'll strip back the paint a bit further an put a fibre glass patch over the whole lot.  Shouldn't be able tell there was ever a hole there.  I still haven't decided exactly how I am going to fill in the remainder of the shaft hole. I'll probably glue in a piece of solid wood.

For the strut base I did basically the same thing.  Routered a new flat 60mm aft of the current one and glued in a filler block.  To do this routing I mad a jig that fits to the shape of the hull. I also had to make a larger sled for to bolt to my trim router to bridge the gap.  With this I was able to easily router the new flats.  After the filler block was done I tilted the jig by 2 degrees and routed the new angle for the strut base. The photo below is with te new angle in place,  The block at the bottom is filling the 60mm and has been faired back to the hull.

This is my test piece when I was developing the jig, but it illustrates well the sled that I bolted to my trim router

Here is the new strut pad getting close to finished, its a bit hard to see from the photos by the 60mm gap created by shifting the strut back has been filled and faired and then the raised end of the filler block has been faired to the rest of the hull.  I don't have a photo that shows it, but after the fairing was completed I sanded back to bare wood around the pad and then glassed over the whole thing.  In fact todays mission is to final fairing / sanding reading for undercoat.