The RUDDER on the old boat was the first thing I saw that needed repair. On the day that we looked at the boat in the dry storage lot, I picked it up to move it out of the way, and it literally fell apart, into three pieces. In cleaning it up, getting ready to refurbish it, I found that the main body of the rudder was made out of a single piece of mahogany, a huge work of craftsmanship. All the more reason to take special care. Not my usual amount of explanation in this post, mostly pictures. Some things to notice: Most of the original parts were cleaned up and reused; I had to create new cheeks, which are the flat pieces on either side of the rudder at the upper end (those pieces that fell off the first day), and add strength; I inserted a carbon fiber tube to add strength in the top of the rudder, which is used to hold the tiller (the arm that the helmsman uses to push the rudder to port or starboard to steer the boat); Fiberglass fabric is white when in a sheet or cut into pieces, but transparent when laid up and saturated with epoxy, anytime there are black lines or dots on the rudder, that is freshly-applied fiberglass (the black marks make it easier to position the fabric); I used clothes pins - yes, you can still find them in the store - to help mold the fiberglass fabric around the airfoil-like shape of the rudder, I glued small strips of wood to each pin to enlarge the area that it would grip...I was too busy with the curing schedule of the epoxy and getting the wrinkles out of the fiberglass fabric to get a picture of the clothes pins on the piece in real time - those pictures are a recreation; That is the pintle from an earlier post, the close-up shows it mounted on the rudder and inserted into the gudgeon on the stern of the boat. This particular project took a long time, and was the subject of much obsession and worry on my part, primarily because I did not want to do anything to irreparably harm the rudder. Now that it is done, it feels like another major milestone in the restoration of the old boat has been reached. WooHoo!
Posted on: Thu, 14 Aug 2014 05:27:55 +0000
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