Keyboard Shortcuts
ctrl + shift + ? :
Show all keyboard shortcuts
ctrl + g :
Navigate to a group
ctrl + shift + f :
Find
ctrl + / :
Quick actions
esc to dismiss
Likes
Search
Should I DIY a homemade rudder blade?
|
Hey guys, I have an old sunfish that my dad go when I was a kid and is now in my hands... the boat is a bit rough, but solid.? I'd like to get a new sail, but first I need to address the rudder, which has a crack going down the middle of it, braced by 4 "thin" pieces of sheet metal, 2 on each side.? I'd like to make a new rudder (and daggerboard?) from quality marine lumber/plywood.? Has anyone done this and have any recommendations?? Then I would feel better about spending money on a new sail! -Ben |
|
I made a rudder, tiller, and dagger out of red oak I got from Lowe's, glassed over with thin light weight cloth and epoxy resin, but red oak is not the best choice of wood, if you can find white oak, mahogany, or ash would be much better. After sand from hitting bottom it wore off some fiberglass and water seeped into wood. Intensity sails has wood and composite blades and tiller and sail for a fraction of the cost of original. The sail is right at $100 , the blades are less than $200 each, even the composites, I would check out their website, compair price against good wood and your labor of cutting, sanding, finishing homemade to intensity sails price. Hugh Sent from my Verizon Motorola Droid |
开云体育Hi, Ben,I’ve made a replacement rudder for a Tech Dinghy and it works great. ?Used it a lot for the first 15 years, less for the next 15, but it’s still fine. If you can affordably get that small a chunk of marine plywood, in suitable thickness, I’d do that. ? For mine, because I wanted a custom thickness (1 1/4”), I laminated it from five layers of generic 1/4” lauan plywood, epoxied together with West epoxy. ?I did make sure (1) there were no voids in the plywood inner layers and (2) that the plywood’s glue passed the boil test (boil half an hour without coming apart). ?Don’t clamp too tightly when you glue it up, you want to keep a non-zero thickness of epoxy In there, not all squoze out. How much of the rest of this you want to mess with will depend on how high a performance and durability you’re going for, and on what your class rules may allow about the shape. After I’d sanded mine to shape, I sheathed it with a layer or two of 6-ounce glass fabric wetted out with epoxy. ?(30 years ago, don’t remember.) ?If you do that, I’d use 2 layers on at least the leading edge and bottom tip, where it’ll be exposed to abrasion. ?(Even so, I’ve ended up dabbing bits of epoxy on as touch-up, once I’ve got it dry after I’ve run it aground on a ramp. ?The wood lasts best if you can keep it sealed.) ?Wet out the wood itself first so the glass doesn’t end up starved by having the wood sponge up the epoxy. Do your class rules specify what profiles the leading and trailing edges can have? ? If not, I’d round the leading edge into a decent approximation of the front half of a slender ellipse (like, extending about 3 board-thicknesses back, to reach full thickness, i.e. like the front half of a 6:1 ellipse), and taper the trailing edge with a long shallow slope, starting maybe 4-6 thicknesses from the edge. ?Taper it to a final edge thickness of about 1/8” to 3/16” so it’s not too fragile. What I actually did, for best streamlining and stall resistance, was actually to sand my fat plywood sandwich to be a NACA 0012 foil shape. ?Did generate a lot of sawdust but wasn’t actually difficult. ?Call it overkill, but it does work very nicely. ?Good to have some 60-grit and 24-grit to grind off most of the bulky part of the task. ?Or a plane, but you’d want to be good at resharpening if you’re using plywood (which kind of eats plane-blade edges). For the leading-edge profile you can plot out the shape full-size on cardboard and cut it out as a fitting gauge, and then once you get a short portion of the edge defined, you can extend that profile up and down the rest of the edge just by watching where your sanding/planing exposes the glue seams in the plywood, like contour lines on a map, and sanding/planing to a shape that makes those lines all run parallel from where they show up on the part you first gauged with the template. For the trailing edge the taper is pretty uniform, so once you’ve established what taper it should be to match the foil, you can just make a wide uniform slope, and round over the region between leading and trailing very broadly, very gently rounded with max thickness about 40% from the leading edge. If you do want the NACA shape and don’t find the shape definition for it on the web easily, write again and I’ll find you one. ?Or if you find a NACA 00-anything, they’re all proportional, you just scale the thickness. ?The -12 (or other ending digits) are the thickness as a percentage of the “chord” (front-to-back dimension), so a 0012 is about an inch thick for an 8-inch chord. ?You don’t have to use exactly a 12 — thinner is faster through the water but fatter is more stall-resistant (i.e., resistant to losing its grip on the water if you steer it abruptly.). If you get much thinner than 12, though, I’d shape the leading and trailing regions as a 12 and leave the middle region flat, to avoid making the edges too sharp. BTW you might think stall resistance is less important with a centerboard, which is always going straight and usually fast — but that’s except when it isn’t going fast. ?If you’re trying to maneuver through a crowded mooring field in light air, it’s a tad disconcerting when your speed drops enough that your board loses its grip and you start moving sideways into that big boat you were trying to sneak past. ?Best protection from that is a smoothly ellipse-like leading edge resembling the nose of the 0012. Take it all for what it’s worth to you — Best, Crispin Miller
|
|
It's a fun woodworking/shop project to make a new rudder blade, and if it's not for racing, it may only matter to yourself how good a reproduction it is. ?But I tried to do this at one point and could not source the size of good wood I wanted at any lumberyard I tried, and the home centers were worse. I almost decided I'd have to first laminate ?some boards to build up a blank... ?You could go with something made of cheap, glassed, shaped pine or oak and throw it away at the end of the season, just so you get on the water sooner to have fun... to me, that's the primary goal. ?And I almost did that.
In the end, I bought a cracked but original rudder for cheap off eBay, and carefully repaired it with internal threaded rods, epoxy and glass, and I trust it. You might have a go at restoring the existing rudder by taking it all apart, sanding it clean, adding some dovetailed jointed plugs or dowels across the break, and epoxying and glassing it back together. I mean, the stakes are low; you can experiment and build a skill. ? New rudders and daggerboards are pretty expensive, relative to the overall cost of an older boat. ?If you plan to race it or sell it, you want OEM, race-legal parts. ? For kicking around the borrow pit or local water hole, it may not be as big a deal. Don't let this stop you from hitting the water! |
|
The cracked/split rudder is common and not too hard to fix. As far as making a new one, why not? As with the Intensity Sails blades (and sails) they are great unless you are planning to race in official, sanctioned Sunfish Class regattas you'll be happy. The quality is great, just they don't pay the big bucks to the builder like official Sunfish stuff.? Tom?
On Monday, May 6, 2019, 4:11:15 PM EDT, mark.suszko@... [sunfish_sailor] wrote:
?
It's a fun woodworking/shop project to make a new rudder blade, and if it's not for racing, it may only matter to yourself how good a reproduction it is. ?But I tried to do this at one point and could not source the size of good wood I wanted at any lumberyard I tried, and the home centers were worse. I almost decided I'd have to first laminate ?some boards to build up a blank... ?You could go with something made of cheap, glassed, shaped pine or oak and throw it away at the end of the season, just so you get on the water sooner to have fun... to me, that's the primary goal. ?And I almost did that. In the end, I bought a cracked but original rudder for cheap off eBay, and carefully repaired it with internal threaded rods, epoxy and glass, and I trust it. You might have a go at restoring the existing rudder by taking it all apart, sanding it clean, adding some dovetailed jointed plugs or dowels across the break, and epoxying and glassing it back together. I mean, the stakes are low; you can experiment and build a skill. ? New rudders and daggerboards are pretty expensive, relative to the overall cost of an older boat. ?If you plan to race it or sell it, you want OEM, race-legal parts. ? For kicking around the borrow pit or local water hole, it may not be as big a deal. Don't let this stop you from hitting the water!
|
|
Yeah I forgot to mention Intensity sails parts are not class race legal, as I always sailed for fun not competition, so it is a lower price way of fixing up an old fish for the fun sailor, and is of good quality, I always did enjoy wood and composite fabrication, had fun cutting shaping sanding finishing drilling etc as I have lots of equipment, and I knew the red oak would not last, just couldn't get mohogany easy enough, but it worked for a while, Hugh Sent from my Verizon Motorola Droid |
开云体育I made a new rudder for my sunfish from an old mahogany? damaged center board I had laying around.? It came out great.? Got to use some of my old woodworking tools I had not used in years.? Took about a good afternoon and three days? for the three coats of spar urethane to dry. ? Mr Mike. ? Sent from for Windows 10 ? From: sunfish_sailor@... on behalf of Thomas Payne thomas3452@... [sunfish_sailor]
Sent: Monday, May 6, 2019 5:02:35 PM To: sunfish_sailor@... Subject: Re: [sunfish_sailor] Re: Should I DIY a homemade rudder blade? ?
?
The cracked/split rudder is common and not too hard to fix. As far as making a new one, why not? As with the Intensity Sails blades (and sails) they are great unless you are planning to race in official, sanctioned Sunfish Class regattas you'll be happy.
The quality is great, just they don't pay the big bucks to the builder like official Sunfish stuff.?
Tom?
On Monday, May 6, 2019, 4:11:15 PM EDT, mark.suszko@... [sunfish_sailor] wrote:
?
It's a fun woodworking/shop project to make a new rudder blade, and if it's not for racing, it may only matter to yourself how good a reproduction it is. ?But I tried to do this at one point and could not source the size of good wood I wanted at any lumberyard I tried, and the home centers were worse. I almost decided I'd have to first laminate ?some boards to build up a blank... ?You could go with something made of cheap, glassed, shaped pine or oak and throw it away at the end of the season, just so you get on the water sooner to have fun... to me, that's the primary goal. ?And I almost did that. In the end, I bought a cracked but original rudder for cheap off eBay, and carefully repaired it with internal threaded rods, epoxy and glass, and I trust it. You might have a go at restoring the existing rudder by taking it all apart, sanding it clean,
adding some dovetailed jointed plugs or dowels across the break, and epoxying and glassing it back together. I mean, the stakes are low; you can experiment and build a skill. ? New rudders and daggerboards are pretty expensive, relative to the overall cost
of an older boat. ?If you plan to race it or sell it, you want OEM, race-legal parts. ? For kicking around the borrow pit or local water hole, it may not be as big a deal. Don't let this stop you from hitting the water!
|
|
Worth Gretter
I second what Mark said about epoxy and threaded rod. This is an awesome repair technique for lots of things, not just rudders. You drill a hole just a little bigger than the rod, and fill it partially with thickened epoxy, then push the rod in. The epoxy of course grips the wood, and it also grips the rod because of the thread. A smooth rod wouldn’t work nearly as well. I have used this for many repairs.
|
开云体育Nice technique for a heavy-duty gluing dowel! The Gougeon Brothers show a similar epoxy-assisted method for anchoring heavy screws into wood, such as to install a winch on a big boat: ? — drill a way-oversize hole for 2/3 the screw depth, and then for the rest of the depth drill a normal pilot hole for that screw size. ? — Fill the hole about halfway with fiber-filled epoxy, so that when the screw’s added the epoxy will fill the hole the rest of the way. ? — Install the screw and whatever it’s attaching, but only gently, yet. — Let the epoxy set fully and then tighten the screw fully. The point of the way-oversize hole is that the fiberfilled epoxy is stronger than the wood, so it takes the load from the screw threads and distributes it to the surface of a much larger hole, so the screw doesn’t strip the wood. Their whole book’s been posted by their company as a free PDF these days, by the way — google “The Gougeon Brothers on Boat Construction.” cm
|
|
On Wednesday, May 08, 2019 08:50:26 PM Crispin Miller crispinmm@...
[sunfish_sailor] wrote: Nice technique for a heavy-duty gluing dowel!Just to give a different perspective, you can use a similar technique to hold up the roof in an underground coal mine (and probably other similar mines) -- use a roof bolter machine to drill a 30 to 72" long hole (sometimes longer, iirc)(I forget the diameter maybe 1 1/2"?) and then pack the hole with specially prepared bags of thick epoxy (the bags have separate compartments for the epoxy and the hardener) then use the roof drill hydraulic pressure to push a "roof bolt" (which in this case is essentially a 30 to 72" long rebar (with the typical rebar "pebbled" surface) with a square head on the end. Pushing the rebar into the hole breaks the bags, then use the drilling function to spin the rebar (again, I forget, either for 60 or 120 seconds) then continue to use the hydraulic pressure to hold the square head (and a steel plate (a 6x6" square "washer") against the roof for another 60 to 120 seconds which allows the expoxy to at least partially cure. (I probably should have noted that, after cutting a typical 20x20 foot section of coal and before installing roof bolts, you set temporary roof supports using timbers cut to the proper length, a wooden half header, and wooden wedges.) Works a treat, holds up mountains! ;-) (Well, at least in drift mines -- in deep mines it holds up the earth's surface ;-) |
|
On Thursday, May 09, 2019 08:32:46 AM rhkramer@... wrote:
Works a treat, holds up mountains! ;-) (Well, at least in drift mines --Well, I guess I should / could go a little further -- they do hold up mountains (or the earth's surface) until you do either longwalling or pillaring at which time you intentionally want the mountain (or earth's surface) to collapse ;-) (to relieve the pressure on the remaining pillars). (Aside: Usually the collapse doesn't have much effect at the earth's surface, depending on how deep the mine is.) |
|
On Thursday, May 09, 2019 09:03:27 AM lewis.kent@... [sunfish_sailor]
wrote: That just sounds incredibly fun, where can I sign up for that! WHo gets toI guess you are replying to me (a fairly easy guess, but would be much easier if you quoted some part of what you are replying to ;-) Anyway, to the best of my recollection, nobody takes the bolts out -- during pillarinig, when the roof falls (intentionally) the bolts come along with it -- no bolts in the main sections that intentionally fall, and that tends to break the bolts in the bolted section loose. (Of course, I never went back into those fallen areas to check ;-) As far as signing up -- jobs are scarce these days, and new technologies (like remote control continuous mining machines) take a lot of excitement out of the job ;-) |
|
I probably shouldn't say this but I do know for a fact you can probably figure out.? The rudders you buy from Intensity are exactly the same ones you get from Sunfish Direct which are class legal. They ccome out of the same stack of rudders. To be class legal you have to buy them from Sunfish and not an aftermarket dealer.?? John Owens
On Wednesday, May 8, 2019, 7:07:19 PM CDT, Mike King mrmike17@... [sunfish_sailor]
?
I made a new rudder for my sunfish from an old mahogany? damaged center board I had laying around.? It came out great.? Got to use some of my old woodworking tools I had not used in years.? Took about a good afternoon and three days? for the three coats of spar urethane to dry. ? Mr Mike. ? Sent from for Windows 10 ? From: sunfish_sailor@... on behalf of Thomas Payne thomas3452@... [sunfish_sailor]
Sent: Monday, May 6, 2019 5:02:35 PM To: sunfish_sailor@... Subject: Re: [sunfish_sailor] Re: Should I DIY a homemade rudder blade? ?
?
The cracked/split rudder is common and not too hard to fix. As far as making a new one, why not? As with the Intensity Sails blades (and sails) they are great unless you are planning to race in official, sanctioned Sunfish Class regattas you'll be happy.
The quality is great, just they don't pay the big bucks to the builder like official Sunfish stuff.?
Tom?
On Monday, May 6, 2019, 4:11:15 PM EDT, mark.suszko@... [sunfish_sailor] wrote:
?
It's a fun woodworking/shop project to make a new rudder blade, and if it's not for racing, it may only matter to yourself how good a reproduction it is. ?But I tried to do this at one point and could not source the size of good wood I wanted at any lumberyard I tried, and the home centers were worse. I almost decided I'd have to first laminate ?some boards to build up a blank... ?You could go with something made of cheap, glassed, shaped pine or oak and throw it away at the end of the season, just so you get on the water sooner to have fun... to me, that's the primary goal. ?And I almost did that. In the end, I bought a cracked but original rudder for cheap off eBay, and carefully repaired it with internal threaded rods, epoxy and glass, and I trust it. You might have a go at restoring the existing rudder by taking it all apart, sanding it clean,
adding some dovetailed jointed plugs or dowels across the break, and epoxying and glassing it back together. I mean, the stakes are low; you can experiment and build a skill. ? New rudders and daggerboards are pretty expensive, relative to the overall cost
of an older boat. ?If you plan to race it or sell it, you want OEM, race-legal parts. ? For kicking around the borrow pit or local water hole, it may not be as big a deal. Don't let this stop you from hitting the water!
|
|
On Thursday, May 09, 2019 09:45:41 AM John Owens jowoodworks@...
[sunfish_sailor] wrote: I probably shouldn't say this but I do know for a fact you can probablyWow, that pretty much s$%#s! |
|
Oh, and I am glad you said it, and think it was entirely appropriate for you
toggle quoted message
Show quoted text
to say it! On Thursday, May 09, 2019 10:27:07 AM rhkramer@... wrote:
On Thursday, May 09, 2019 09:45:41 AM John Owens jowoodworks@... Wow, that pretty much s$%#s! |
|
He has to mark it up to make some money over his cost and Sunfish marks it up because "They are Sunfish" John Owens
On Thursday, May 9, 2019, 10:23:53 AM CDT, hughcg@... [sunfish_sailor] wrote:
?
Competition cost, fun is affordable Sent from my Verizon Motorola Droid |
Signal Charlie
to navigate to use esc to dismiss