A Turning Point, the evolving rudder...

Who would have thought that sinking my boat would take the wind out of my blogging sails?  Egads.  The story is not over (not by a long shot.  I won't steer you wrong--in fact lets talk about steering!

When this boat was abuilding I don't really recall what Payson mentioned about rudder hardware. One thing though, there's darned little out there designed for a double ended (and pointy ended at that) sailboat.  It gets a little better when you have a real stem and stern (as exposed timbers--but those timbers are buried under plywood, so some sort of canoe rudder hardware is required.

Being cheap and not really seeing anything cheap and easy to procure, the first thought was:  why not make them out of wood.  Yes!  Wood gudgeons and wood pintles!  It is a wood boat after all, no?

Somewhere around this time, I had come across the Wooden Boat Forum, and in there, lots and lots and lots of photos of James McMullen's Rowan, an Ian Oughtred design called the Sooty Tern.  It certainly wasn't the boat I was going to build (being 19'--certainly not), but there were plenty of photos of construction details, including the rudder.  Well, the Rowan had nice cast bronze hardware, which I wasn't thinking I could replicate.  Still, good design is always an inspiration, and the idea of having flowing carved gudgeons in dark wood as brightwork against a white hull still strikes me as something really cool to attempt--with a proper bandsaw and sanders........  Lacking that certainly changed the outcome.



Wait though.  Wasn't the  Annas Discorse equipped with a rudder?  Of course, but the Annas Discorse also has a transom, a narrow one, but a transom just the same, and so was able to use much more common gudgeons for a flat surface.  A picture here will explain neatly:

From the Annas Discorse--note the transom end of the boat--not pointy.

 So, what resulted is sort of brute force gudgeons.  The pintles would probably qualify as brute force trauma--and the two were connected by dowels made from cut down broom handles.  Did it work?  Well... sort of ....   note the sort here.  A picture might be more interesting....

Even at this early point, this I think is the second time out, the wooden pintles were regarded as failures and replaced with "Payson Eyes" (large screw eyes).  The pins are dowels, with copper wire keepers.    

 

 

The wooden pintles just didn't work, the non-square pivoting of a sharpie end caused them to bind and frankly, they were really bulky and ugly--that blunt force trauma thing.  They were replaced with "Payson eyes", (ie, screw eyes).  They performed better, so long as the pins didn't get lost.  The gudgeons actually functioned quite well, for being sort of whacked out of tight grained 2 x 4 stock.  They stayed with the boat even after it was painted.  The misshapen rudder stock was ok, but rudder failures kept cropping up, and that takes all the fun out of going out on the water.  Time for a new plan....

Wooden Boat Magazine has a wonderful forum that is full of all sorts of interesting stuff. Even though the bulk of it is aimed toward traditional construction methods and larger boats, good design ideas and sound construction techniques are everywhere.   One of the threads I was reading involved rudders, and one photo (getting permission for it) posted by "Thorne" gave me a straightforward solution to making a decent pop up rudder.  Rather than having the blade of the rudder fit within the rudder stock "cheeks" why not have smaller cheeks that pivot with the rudder blade?  A picture of what I built:

 

 

Simpler, easier and, as a bonus, more effective!

Showing the rudder head, and the tiller extension.  Of course later it was suggested to have the tiller on the other side, which is where it still resides, though changing it (or breaking it down for storage, is simply a matter of pulling the pin and switching it.

The new design required changing to a push pull tiller, but that was ok, as I was tired of having the tiller handle sticking me in the back, and having to reach around to work it while sitting in the middle of the boat.  The rudder blade was recycled, but rather than use a rope tie down to keep it down, I decided to weight it with lead--handy when one has a hot metal pot built into an Intertype machine.....

So... what did I do about the pintles and gudgeons?  Will, I got lucky to find a set of stainless canoe gudgeons on Ebay, and later wound up buying pintles from Duckworks.  Of course the two didn't mate, as the gudgeon pins were too big, but I had access to a lathe and did machine them down, yielding a much handier setup.  It certainly took time to get used to the new tiller setup, and some really exciting gybes were the result, but I consider the new rudder a success, and it will likely remain with the boat for as long as it sails. 

Next time around, perhaps a look at the sails is in order, or the mast, it'll be one or the other.