Times when you miss the simplicity of your old Compac.... (steering)

[Shawn]

(Crazy long post.....)

When I bought my Compac 23 it had steering issues. Somewhere in its history somebody hung the rudder using stainless fully threaded  bolts. They had corroded in the bushings and did not rotate well, loads of friction. I replaced the entire rudder gudgeon and had the new one modified by Ida Sailer with delrin bushings to match the kick up rudder assembly. At the time, I thought this steering repair was a difficult job as I had to climb in the seat locker to get at the bolts and more or less work blind from inside.

Now I just worked through my Sabre 28's wheel steering system and have a new perspective on this.

Below the Sabres cockpit floor there is a wood backing plate for the pedestal. My pedestal has been leaking for some time and this plate was rotting. As such the pedestal felt a little wiggly. At the end of last season I noticed that a grease cup in my steering wiggled side to side when I turned the wheel. You could feel this in the wheel. This was a symptom of a larger problem, the packing gland on the steering shaft had broken free. The top of the gland is basically the bearing surface for a thrust washer and a ring around the rudder shaft that holds the rudder in place. Over time the glands seal with the rudder shaft broke which allowed it to rotate somewhat. This is mostly above the water line but still not a good thing as the grease cup ends up stopping the rotation by hitting the sides of the rudder tube and it was slowly cutting into the tube.

I dove into the system to fix this and make some other changes in the boat.

I attacked this out of order... I dropped the rudder first then removed the pedestal. It would have been easier to do it the other way. To get at the steering radial drive, packing gland and everything you go through the rear seat locker. The pedestal gets in the way of bending down into that.

In theory dropping the rudder is as simple as releasing the tension on the steering cables (eye bolts through the radial drive)  and then taking out 6 bolts. In reality the steering system is a mixture of aluminum and stainless parts that have been together for 38 years. The stainless eye bolts pass through the aluminum radial drive.... and galvanically welded together. Removing the tensioner nuts did nothing as the bolts were locked together. End up having to cut the cables... not a big deal as I was going to replace them anyway.  Just access was hard.
Then there were two stainless through bolts and four smaller bolts that clamp the two piece radial drive to the rudder shaft. The through bolts were just stainless to stainless so they opened up ok. One bolt really didn't want to pass through the shaft though, ended up using a slide hammer to get it through. (Access to the backside to bang it though was blocked due to a bulkhead) The four bolts holding the radial drive together were stainless into threaded aluminum on the radial drive. Two actually came out, two snapped but fortunately, they snapped in the back half of the drive where the threading started. That let it come apart so I could drill it out of the boat. Turns out there are also two small bolts/nuts under the drive too at the outer ends of the radial drive. I didn't see them till later but they didn't prevent the rudder from sliding out.

After all that you can see the packing gland..... (it took 3 or 4 days to get to this point due to all the fun with the bolts and not having needed tools (break bars, slide hammer, etc) with me at the boat yard)



To actually fix this was pretty easy. I sanded around the rudder tube to let epoxy stick to it and then used thickened epoxy (6 pumps) to smooth the bottom edge of the gland to the rudder tube and then glassed it all with about 15-20' of fiberglass tape in 4-6" sections working around the gland and smoothing it all together. About 12 more pumps of epoxy here. One of the mounting bolt holes also let a much longer bolt through it. I put an inch longer bolt in that position (with olive oil on it) and glassed that in place too. When it is put back together that will be an additional grip on keeping the gland from rotating. I kept the glass below the level of the bottom half of the gland and shaped the glass around the reinforcements in the floor again to help hold it in place.





Probably overkill in how much glass I used but I don't want to deal with this again.

After that was setting up I started working on removing the pedestal. I already had great access to the underside as typically a Sabre has a 20 gallon tank of diesel there. I pulled that when I went to the outboard.

4 bolts... how hard could it be?

4 *aluminum* bolts with stainless steel nuts and a slot head on the top. Trying to keep the bolts from spinning up top with a large screwdriver was useless. The heads were getting beat up. The bolts were considerably longer than needed so I ended up putting two more nuts on each bolt and locked them together then used that to hold the bolt still while I tried to back out the mounting nut. Ended up snapping three of the bolts (they were badly corroded so they would need to be swapped out anyway) and the fourth (hard access from below) I ended drilling out from above. New bolts were around $80 from Edson and now they are SS.  Getting the pedestal out let me see how bad the backing plate really was:



I also found that the core in my cockpit floor was rotted due to the leaking at the pedestal. I dug as much rotted balsa out as I could then glassed a 1'x2'x3/4" fiberglass backing plate under the floor for the pedestal.



The slot is where the cables pass through to the radial drive. Normally all the empty space under there is fuel tank, it is going to hold my inflatable dinghy.

After that plate was good and solid I then filled all the mounting holes from above with epoxy to try and fill in some of the rotted core I removed and to seal the holes from letting in any more water. Of course epoxy spilled out the back of the plate and made a mess. I ended up doing this is two stages using thickened epoxy to fill the bottom of the hole to the plate and then after that hardened filling the core with epoxy. After all that hardened I redrilled all the holes.




Took the pedestal and idler pulley plate home and totally stripped them down to bare metal with a combination of sanding and brass brush in a polisher. Used aluminum primer on the pedestal and put multiple coats of enamel paint on both. While at home I also started working on installing a wheel drive for an autopilot, relined the wheel break and swapped out the bushings in the idler pulleys too.

I also swaged new SS wire onto the chain for the steering system.



And drilled out all the busted bolts in the radial drive. I ended up opening all four bolt holes to forget about the threading in the radial drive itself and just bought longer bolts to use actual nuts on it to make life easier later on.

Reassembly was basically all of this in reverse. Couple of gotchas.... the fiberglass collar that holds the rudder in place can be basically in 1 of 4 positions. It only fits together properly in one of those four options. Should have marked top/bottom and front/rear on it before removing it. The scissor jack was a big help in getting the rudder back in as I did almost all of this singlehanded.

I sealed the pedestal with butyl tape.  After that it was just cutting the SS wire to the right length, putting the wire clamps on and tensioning the system. You can't really see the position of the wires until the system is tensioned. I ended up having to remove the pedestal an additional three or four times to work out interference problems. It is very tight in there and even the direction of the chain matters. Put the cotter pins on the chain facing away from the wire clamps in the pedestal or they lightly will touch. I also opened up the holes for the cables more in the floor as the position of the pedestal had slightly shifted from my epoxy and redrilled holes. The cable was lightly touching the side of one of the holes before I did this. The borescope was a huge help in checking all of this. Again the extra nuts on the pedestal bolts let me keep them from moving while I tightened down their nuts.



While all of this was going on I also was working on other changes to the boat.

I put a garboard drain in the boat:



Which was great as it let me really scrub down the old engine compartment and get it nice and clean in there. That will also make sure I never collect any water in the bilge over the winter which I have had problems with. And Sabre was *dumb* and didn't seal the wood in the bilge for the cabin floor.

I also put in a much better bilge pump. I had been using a cheapish pump but they lasted about a year and left a fair amount sit in the bilge. I used a Whale Gulper 320 which is self priming diaphragm pump. The pump is mounted feet away from the bilge and using a pickup and float switch to turn it on. I used the Whale solid state float switch that also includes an addition 30 second run time after the switch shuts off. That lets the pump continue to run and clear the line up to the pumps position. I also have an inline strainer but it probably isn't needed. This gets all but a couple of sponges of water out of the bilge. This pump would be great on the 23.

During this entire ordeal I kept thinking about the simplicity of the Compac 23 and did some more work toward that. I had already pulled the inboard and went with an outboard but decided to go further in that direction. I pulled out all the old wiring for the engine (lots of it) and any other engine related accessories that were still in the boat. That ended up giving me a great mounting position for the bilge pump where the old raw water strainer was mounted.

I also decided I was sick of smelling the holding tank (weird salty nasty smell) and pulled it and the associated plumbing and head out. The plumbing to the holding tank meant that there would always be sewage in one of the hoses so smells are a never ending battle. I put a Dometic portapotie in place and plumbed it for MSD. The deck fittings are a couple of feet away and the lines are vertical so they will always drain. That and the fresh water flush should greatly limit smells. Removing all of this opened up the entire area under the port birth for storage... it was all tankage and plumbing before. For how little this ends up getting used I feel like this was a good decision. The head on the Sabre is part of the passthrough between the cabin and V berth so it has double doors for privacy. The Dometic just fit in place while still allowing the V berth door to latch in its open position.





In the area of simplification I now had 3 thru-hulls and seacocks that were not for anything, 2 for the head and 1 for the inboard. I ended up glassing over all of them to remove the maintenance associated with then. I also glassed over some old instrumentation sensor that were in the bow but that don't really work and I don't use. Didn't like that they were just sealed with an O ring.

Finally I wired in the Raymarine EV100 autopilot and mounted the control board. I have actually had this for a couple of years but hadn't gotten around to installing it. Really looking forward to it as I loved the tiller pilot on Serenity. Make single handing much easier.

All of this took about 3 weeks and the boat is finally about to get launched.

Shawn

[Andre]

Shawn,

I am SO impresssed with your work and especially your perseverance in tackling and completing the project.  I'm old enough (66) that my back could never handle a project like that.  I hope you're much younger, or else I'll really feel bad, ha, ha.

Looks like I'd better stick to my Picnic Cat and Horizon Cat!  Sometimes even working on the HC challenges me.

Best of luck with your Sabre .....

Andre

[Shawn]

Andre,

Thanks. Believe me, this project was really testing my patience. It felt like pretty much every step it was fighting me. And that isn't including the dead batteries (both banks?), leaking fuel connector, diaphragm loose on the bilge pump and a bunch of other little details that kept popping up. Finally got through them all though and the boat is being launched tomorrow.

I'm 45 and my back is a mess after all of this. Too much climbing in and out of seat lockers, hanging upside down to get at the steering and up and down ladders. Hopefully it is all squared away so I don't have to go into this system again.

Good luck with your cats! I've always liked the looks of the HC and the Picnic cat looks like an awesome little boat.

Shawn

[moonlight]

Brings back quite a few memories.

I did my first pedestal in the mid 90's, and still do one for someone every few years.  But I've got access to a great blaster (shop) and numerous painters; I can usually get one bead blasted (while they're doing something else, it's just on the side), and painted the same way (when they're spraying another entire yacht) for about $600.  I'd hate to think of the time involved in manually stripping and manually painting.

Your discussion of dis-similar metals has been condensed to a pre-packaged sermon many of my customers endure.   "There's no such thing as a pleasant divorce!".  Whether a church wedding, a civil service, or a common law marriage of time ... anything that's been together 10-12-15 et cetera years doesn't come across easily.

Trick of the trade:  Always bed stainless steel into aluminum with clean threads and blue loctite.  That creates a chemical barrier stopping the galvanic action...

GREAT JOB!  And well documented too.

[Shawn]

Thanks, I was actually pleasantly surprised how fast it was to the strip the pedestal. I probably didn't even need to bother with sanding first. I was using 100 grit to start off with and it of course left a lot of sanding marks in the aluminum. Sander could not reach well at a couple  seams so I switched to a brass wire wheel in my buffer to try and get the old finish off. It took that off easily but also left a very smooth surface behind. So I then used the wheel on the entire pedestal to get it ready for painting. Wiped it down with acetone and then used aluminum primer and enamel paint on it. Probably 5 hours in total to strip and paint it. I did it all in one afternoon. Paint actually turned out great until I tried to fix one little run. That was dumb.... rest of the paint looks great. Hope it holds up.

Thanks for the tip on the loctite. I hadn't heard using it for that purpose before. When I put everything back together I used lanocote to hopefully avoid the corrosion in the future.

Shawn

[brackish]

Have to say that during the sixteen years I owned my Columbia 8.7 many times I said "this boat is kinda large for tiller, sure wish I had wheel steering".  After reading your very detailed repair summary, I've concluded I may have been better off.  Nice work!  I just rebuilt my riding lawn mower deck with an initial plan of rebuilding the spindles.  After just six years, nothing associated with the spindles could be salvaged due to the curse of dissimilar metals.  So new spindles and this time maybe better luck with an anti seize compound.

[Shawn]

The base problem of the packing gland rotating would exist on a tiller version of the Sabre but the repair would have been dramatically easier as it would have been a single bolt to drop the rudder. And realistically I could have probably just glassed up the bottom of the packing gland with it all in place.

When I was shopping for Sabres I looked at one with a tiller. The tiller head is actually a foot or two forward of the back of the cockpit (the original cockpit layout, not the later T shaped one) and you would need to steer from the front of the cockpit. Problem with that is the main sheet is at the stern like on the 23. Would have been a tough setup to single hand and the sweep of the tiller took up most of the cockpit. Wheel steering was originally optional but so many went with it Sabre changed the cockpit layout in the Mark IIs (mine) and made the wheel steering standard.

Shawn