STEERING SYSTEM
On the first boat I used an electric trolling motor.
The stern is about 3 1/2 foot from the rear of the cockpit, so you really can't
reach the tiller. I moved the tiller into the cockpit. The way it works is
there's a pulley on the shaft of the trolling motor. Cables exiting the rear of
the boat pull the pulley right and left. There's over 180 degree range of motion
here. I thought up all sorts of ways to control these cables, but what I settled
on is the following:
I
ran 1/2 PVC electrical conduit from the stern up through the ribs on both sides
of the boat up to forward compartment. The conduit conducts 1/16" galvanized
cable that runs through two pulleys attached to the deck rib in the forward
compartment.
Between
the 44 inch ribs on the starboard side there's a gap where there's no conduit.
The control system is in this section.
In the
picture on the upper left you'll see steering system parts. There's a bracket
that bolts to the gunnel on the inside. A pie shaped wedge slides back and forth
in the bracket. Later, I screwed eye bolts in either side of the wedge. The
cable comes into the wedge from the stern side and plugs into the bow side of
the wedge. The bow side cable comes across the wedge and plugs into the stern
side. To keep the two cables from interfering with one another, the conduit to
the stern is about 1 inch lower than the conduit to the bow. The control box is
screwed into the arms that come off the wedge and the tiller arm of the trolling
motor with its switch mechanism, which is thankfully modular and comes out of
the motor very easily and just plugs in, sits in this box which was carefully
sized and designed to fit the switching mechanism exactly. The grooved pulley
you see in the top two pictures didn't work and was replaced with an un-grooved
pulley that bolts onto the trolling motor shaft. This system provides very
smooth steering.
Click
for COMPLETE STEERING SYSTEM PLANS free and online of course!
Any questions? Email
me, I'd be happy to answer them.
Legal Disclaimer: This
website is intended for entertainment purposes only. The author is not a
professional shipwright or naval architect. Many of the methods used building
these boats are untested. It is not recommended that anyone follow the example
on this website to construct a boat or anything else for that matter. If you do
use any of these methods you, your family, friends, and anyone else you can
think of could be hurt, drowned, maimed, or otherwise killed due to the faulty
construction.
Copyright 2003, Edward Askew. All rights
reserved.
