Versus other sailboats I've been on my 380 seems very stiff to steer. Is this normal? The boat was out of the water for cleaning and the rudder has been visually inspected - nothing obvious. Any ideas?
Steering?
- Thread starter Wkemple
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I don't have experience with your boat, but I recently had stiff steering on my Catalina 309. I had her hauled and discovered that the problem was in the bearings at the top and bottom of the rubber tube.
Before you haul her, disconnect your steering wheel from your rudder. You can do this simply by putting a lot of slack in the steering cables. If you have an autopilot, make sure it's not engaged and dragging in any way. Your wheel should move freely back and forth. Also, with the steering slacked, dive under the boat and grab the rudder and move it back and forth. It should move fairly freely. If it doesn't, you have found your problem.
If in doubt, haul her out. The bearings in my 309 looked like they'd been installed by a drunken imbecile. the rudder tube didn't point directly to the attachment point for the rudder shaft up at the deck, and to compensate, the maker had ground a lot of material off the outsides of the bearings to allow for alignment. And they greased the top one, which you should NEVER do with that material...makes it swell and ruins it. The screws that were supposed to hold the bearings in place were either missing or very poorly placed, allowing the bearing to turn in the rudder tube, destroying the maker's poor effort at compensating for misalignment. It was difficult to diagnose all this, as at the time I knew little of rudder construction, and the maker was too busy doing CYA to be of any help.
Bottom line, your steering should not be stiff, and you need to know if it's the rudder. Your rudder can be seriously bound up, and still steerable, because the wheel gives you a lot of leverage...the long wheel spokes and the gear in the helm vs. the larger pulley on the rudder shaft.
Because the maker had done such a screwy job in the first place, there was little point in my buying a set of five hundred dollar bearings and doing a similar but better job than the maker. I ended up using the West Marine system for creating epoxy/graphite bearings, resulting in perfect rudder shaft alignment and extremely easy steering...like wet ice on teflon.
Oh...and we can assume you didn't bump anything with your rudder and bend the shaft?
Before you haul her, disconnect your steering wheel from your rudder. You can do this simply by putting a lot of slack in the steering cables. If you have an autopilot, make sure it's not engaged and dragging in any way. Your wheel should move freely back and forth. Also, with the steering slacked, dive under the boat and grab the rudder and move it back and forth. It should move fairly freely. If it doesn't, you have found your problem.
If in doubt, haul her out. The bearings in my 309 looked like they'd been installed by a drunken imbecile. the rudder tube didn't point directly to the attachment point for the rudder shaft up at the deck, and to compensate, the maker had ground a lot of material off the outsides of the bearings to allow for alignment. And they greased the top one, which you should NEVER do with that material...makes it swell and ruins it. The screws that were supposed to hold the bearings in place were either missing or very poorly placed, allowing the bearing to turn in the rudder tube, destroying the maker's poor effort at compensating for misalignment. It was difficult to diagnose all this, as at the time I knew little of rudder construction, and the maker was too busy doing CYA to be of any help.
Bottom line, your steering should not be stiff, and you need to know if it's the rudder. Your rudder can be seriously bound up, and still steerable, because the wheel gives you a lot of leverage...the long wheel spokes and the gear in the helm vs. the larger pulley on the rudder shaft.
Because the maker had done such a screwy job in the first place, there was little point in my buying a set of five hundred dollar bearings and doing a similar but better job than the maker. I ended up using the West Marine system for creating epoxy/graphite bearings, resulting in perfect rudder shaft alignment and extremely easy steering...like wet ice on teflon.
Oh...and we can assume you didn't bump anything with your rudder and bend the shaft?
I had a Hunter 380 for nine years and it always had stiff steering. However, you need to check to see if you have an auto pilot chain connected to the wheel axis inside the Pedestal. I found lubricating that chain helped a lot. But it always remained a stiff steering boat.
Good luck.
Good luck.
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