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.