Team Seacats

Two things today just couldn’t stand the pressure. Travis Phillips helped me again this evening to disassemble the rubber snubbers in the rudder system. These snubbers form the pivot between the two rudder arms and the solid tiller bar that connects them. The snubbers on this boat had only about 3/16″ of the rubber material exposed between the aluminum fittings. This results in a lot of extra stress on the rubber – and these have been known to break. Travis found that one of them had cracked nearly in two – it was about to break clean. Good thing we were replacing them! With things apart, we took the aluminum tiller bar into the shop and sawed about 1/2″ off each end so more of the snubber would be exposed in the joint. Then we reassembled the system with new rubber pieces and realigned the rudders (I was erroneous in thinking I didn’t have to do this the other day!). Realigning these canted hulls and rudders when nothing is square was difficult. After several frustrating attempts of measuring, we tipped the boat up stern high and sighted down the hulls aligning the rudders by eye. Then we measured – and lo and behold it was right.

As I indicated yesterday, I tried to tighten up the rivet pin in the cleat swivel this morning at work in a hydraulic press. I lowered the piston on the pin and applied a slight pressure and upon inspection, I didn’t change much. I put it back in and applied a little more pressure and the whole thing flattened like a pancake! It’s mangled and won’t even move so I put in an order for a new replacement from SailMax.biz.

Originally uploaded by Team Seacats.