During this spring's haul out, I set out to fix this 'bang' in the rudder. I had a pretty good idea that the problem was in the lower gudgeon and this proved to be true upon inspection. The rudder pintel had worn out an oval in the gudgeon which left about a 1/4" of play. To remove the gudgeon, we had to grind through almost an 1" of fiberglass jus to get to the bolts. Once there, I found that the lower gudgeon is the only part of the boat that is not bonded and the bolts were about half gone from Galvonic corrosion! The next amazing discovery was that although the gedgeon is almost 3" deep, the pintel only extended into the hole about 1/2" so there was the entire load of the rudder on a relatively small surface area. No wonder it wore out! The solution was easy. The pintel is simply inserted into the rudder in a bronze fitting and made from 1" prop shaft. I simply made the pintel 2 1/2" longer and reassembled and laid up new glass. The only other modification was the addition of a clam shell zinc.
So the moral of the story is...check yours out.
Duane Yoslov
Mystic CD330
Sausalito, CA
yoslovd@aol.com
An Interesting Rudder Discovery
Moderator: Jim Walsh