Rudder shaping

More work on the rudders. After getting the stations on, it was time to fit the foam I had previously layered up with epoxy. I cut them to fit between the stations and when the pieces were clamped together, I could use my drill press to start some holes for where the shaft will be. Then I hogged the rest of the foam out with a knife and file, finding high spots by using a piece of sandpaper wrapped around a piece of aluminum tube.

Then using some thickened epoxy where the shaft lays in the foam, and regular epoxy over the rest of the mating surfaces, I glued them up using clamps. Decided against a vacuum bag just because clamps seemed good enough and quicker.

After the foam was on, I jumped right into shaping. I had shurform (not sure of spelling) tools from Stanley tools. One with a roughing type plate and one with a grit encrusted steel plate. I first had to glue on the bottom station to aid in developing final shape of the bottom of the rudder. To speed up shaping, I used a 9" sander/grinder to remove most of excess foam, the random/orbital sander to get down close to the stations, then the Shurforms to shape closer to final. The glue lines in the foam laminations proved tedious to work down, since they were so much harder than the surrounding foam. It is difficult to not lose to much foam either side of the glue line. The shurform with the grit plate worked good across the glue line after taking a file to get most out of the way.

Rudders taking shape

I've been making some progress on the rudders. After roughing up the stainless shafts with my hand grinder, I added some spiral wrapped layers of biaxial fiberglass tape, and vacuum bagged it on where the blade of the rudder will be.

Then next step is affix the stations onto the fiberglass sections. I drew centerlines on the stations and then using a level against the front and back stations, marked the centerline along the shaft with a pencil. I wanted the keyway already machined into the shaft to be in-line with the stations, so I could take care of any Ackermann geometry in the tillers. My centerline on the shaft and the the stations turned out to not be accurate enough to use alone, so I got them as close as I could in position and checked alignment by putting a straightedge along the tails of the stations - making sure they were all aligned with each other. I think I am pretty close to being in line with the keyway. Any slight variation can be dealt with in the tiller connection to the cross bar. There I plan to have (on the tiller arm) an offcenter bracket pivot point where the cross member joining the two tillers connect. A future picture of that will clear up any muddiness in my description.

I tabbed these stations on with pieces of biaxial after a small cove of thickened epoxy. I did this after the epoxy I used to fix the position of the stations was set up.

Work on rudder shafts, rudder cassettes, and some various hatches

Found a local guy who could cut the keyways for my rudder shafts. That solved a problem for me in that getting the shafts to Anchorage and having a shop cut them there would have been about 5 times the expense.

So I've roughed up the shafts prior to wrapping them with biaxial fiberglass where the blade will be. I've also started working on the rudder cassettes - squaring off the bottoms of them and filling some repair areas and pin holes from old glassing job.

I've also been giving hatches last coats of epoxy, and in the case of a couple outside ones, I vacuum bagged on some fiberglass cloth, using the vacuum mainly to bend it around the edges better than I've been doing.

Previous to this, I did some work on hatch frames: