I’ve taken the tiller arm that has the quadrant for my steering system and attaches to my rudder off again, so it will be aligned better than the last time I put it on. I’ve found an interesting situation I’m trying to decide what I can do about.
I’ve seen the inside of a sister ship’s rudder, so I have a pretty good idea how it is built. It has a fiberglass shell, filled with balsa core and filler, and it has a big stainless pipe that goes the vertical length of the rudder, with some stainless webbing going out inside the rudder from it. Instead of classic gudgeons and pintles, this pipe is exposed and a bearing is clamped around it in two places. The top of this pipe is open, and the emergency tiller drops into the top of it.
And this is my problem–the pipe fills with water. It is very obvious because one of the three bolts holding this tiller arm onto the rudder goes straight through the pipe, and when I loosened that bolt water started coming out. Now that it is apart, the top half has drained dry, but I don’t think the bottom half dry yet, or likely to stay that way. I don’t like standing water in stainless parts, too much chance for corrosion.
A plug for the top of the hole would help, and I’m going to look for something there.
What should I do about it? I could try to fill the pipe with something (polyurethane foam?) and drill it out around that one bolt hole. But the top needs to stay open a few inches down to allow for the emergency tiller.
I could leave it as it is–it doesn’t seem to have caused serious problems in the last 30 years…but it just doesn’t feel “right” either.
Barry