Do you suffer from stiff rudder?

[CliffMilliner]

Gav and I swapped boats for a hour last year, and we both commented then that my rudder gave more feel, and his felt stiffer. (Said with a straight face)

On my new boat I had to push quite firmly to put the rudder on. Once on, you didn't really notice it, but that extra friction must be causing a lack of feel/ feedback. So this is a guide on how to loosen your stiff rudder.

Part 1 Gudgeon vertical alignment
With the rudder off. Take a long straight edge (spirt level works best), and check the vertical alignment of the gudgeons, by placing it against the sides of the top and bottom gudgeons, on both sides. You may find that they don't quite line up. With my level on the starboard side of the top gudgen there was a 1-2mm gap to the bottom one. This tells you they are not vertically lined up correctly.

If you put the rudder back on and look from the side you will see it will rest one of the gudgeons and have a gap to the other. Mine rests on the bottom one, so I would think this takes most of the load. I therefor removed the top one, and with a drill elongated the holes in the gudgeon by about 2mm, so I could now re fix in correct alignment. If your lucky this will be all you need to do so try it. If not move on to part 2

Part 2 vertical angle of gudgeons
Lossen off the top gudgeon, and lossen off the 4 nuts on the bottom Pintel on the rudder stock, wiggle them about a bit to make sure they are nice and free.
Now comes the trial and error bit. With them both loose you should be able to find an angle for them both that you can put the rudder on and off with little friction. ( you may need 3 hands for this bit, so get the wife involved)

Slowly tighten the loose gudgeon, while continuously putting the stock on and off. I found that only when I did the final tighten of the screws the rudder went stiff again. Turns out it was pulling the top of the gudgeon into the top curve of the rudder mount. So I packed the top half of the gudgeon out with Mylar tape to get it to sit at the correct angle.

Then find the correct angle for your bottom pintal and tighten the nuts, and hey presto hopefully your stiff rudder problem is cured.

Cliff
1190
Ps This topic could descend into innuendo so I rewrote this several times, but decided the post the sensible version just in case...

[AlistairGlen]

Cliff,

You may have solved the issue of 'stiffness' but inadvertently skewed the rudder in relation to the centreline of the boat. The real problem is finding a datum somewhere amongst the transom fittings and working from that. During your visit to Hartleys did they mention whether their laser-guided naval (spellchecker wanted to insert 'navel' ) architect had aligned the rudder and/or fittings or just the centre plate case.

Alistair

[CliffMilliner]

This is a good point and one I did think of while doing it, but decided that was just to hard to find a way of getting the center line at the transom.

[Merlin]

Cliff,

This is useful to read, having ordered a new boat. This is something I will add to my list of things I need to do/check before accepting the boat.

Steve

[AdrianNeal]

This reminds me of our RS400 recently. The boat had developed some wear at the gudgeons which was particularly noticeable when tacking. Thinking it would be a good idea to replace said gudgeons with new ones, I duly purchased and fitted the new ones. Pleased with the nice new feeling of the rudder on land we launched and went for a sail. The resultant feel or rather lack of feel through the tiller was unbelievable. The boat was virtually unsailable. Needless to say the new gudgeons had a close encounter with the drill on our return to shore!

Adrian
1012