In a previous post I added an iroko bush to the rudder. I also wanted to reinforce the leading edge and bottom of the blade. My blade was showing scuff marks where it had hit things.
I initially tried putting fibreglass tape and epoxy onto the leading edge:
The problem was that it looked horrible – probably due to my inexperience with fibreglass tape. The rudder is very visible and I want it to look nice.
Continue readingMaking the bushings for the centreboard. This has an iroko bush fitted to the centreboard, pivoting on an acetal bush around the bolt. The acetal bush serves two purposes:
Note that the hole in the acetal bush is countersunk – hopefully this will make it easier to get everything aligned when it is fitted.
This is me being fussy – I know – but I don’t really like wood bearing on steel bolts. Thus I wanted to put a bush into the rudder plate to act as a bearing. I was going to use acetal/Delrin but this is tricky to bond to the rudder blade, so I used iroko instead. While this is still wood it is very tough and pretty much waterproof. It can also be epoxied to the rudder blade.
Setting up the rudder blade for drilling
Making the iroko bush
Replaced a tap in the kitchen this week. The old tap leaked and it wasn’t possible to fix it. It should be a straightforward job but as usual there were issues…
The main issue was that the hole in the worktop is too big for the new tap – the edge of the tap would only overlap the hole by about 1mm. Not enough. So I made an adapter from acetal/Delrin.
Starting the job in the lathe
I know that the centreboard is missing varnish, and it hurts to put wood into water with no protection. So I needed to get the board out. First stage of this is getting the bolt out. On a Wanderer this sits under the floorboards and has two nuts – presumably the second is a lock-nut. Continue reading
Small job this, but it had been bugging me for a long time. We’ve got a cheap bathroom cupboard and the handles looked like this:
Plating falling off = cut hands
Now the handles look like this:
Not perfect but much much better!
Varnished with Le Tonkinois varnish – a great product.
The stainless steel bolt holding the wooden rudder blade to the aluminium rudder stock had corroded in place. I tried heating it up, but the thick aluminium conducts heat away really well, and the wooden blade will catch fire if too much heat is applied. So I decided to drill it out.
All the documents say that a Wanderer dinghy should be supported under the keel; not under the sides and bilge keel. Mine wasn’t supported under the keel, plus the trolley had bent (probably due to the forces putting the boat on and off the trailer before I built the ramps).
The launch trolley has bent, touching the hull
It wasn’t easy to load and unload the launch trolley from the road trailer before I replaced the suspension units, but now I needed to fix the issue.
I made some ramps to fit under the launch trolley wheels. These have a flat section so that the trolley can disengauge from the trailer, and then a ramp to lower the trolley to the ground. Made from old timber recycled from something else (look closely at the pictures to see the odd holes!) Continue reading
The torsion rubber suspension in my boat trailer was worn out. It was about 40 years old so the rubber had compressed and become hard resulting in no springing. In addition the hub bearings were noisy but hard to replace – they were ball bearing hubs with no easy way to get the old races out. So I decided to replace the lot.
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