Kaimusailing

When I got back to work I expected to find more errors in my roving layup of the rudder hinges on the skegs. It turned out there were just two problems, both on the port skeg. The lower gudgeon was missing one laver of rovings, the rovings on the upper gudgeon had slipped down a bit. These were remedied by adding the missing layer to the lower gudgeon and adding a bundle of roving strands to fill in the missing space on the upper gudgeon.
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Over on the starboard hull, the topmost gudgeon still needed to be glassed but I had no idea how to clamp onto that part of the hull to hold the fiberglass rovings in place. I ended up running a couple of bungie cords around the sternpost and putting plastic pads to keep the epoxy off the cords and some pieces of wood to force the plastic into position.
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These repairs of repairs set up and it was time to do the build up on the gudgeons of the starboard rudder. This is the rudder that has one good gudgeon at the top, so it should be the easier of the two to line up. The procedure is to put the pins into the gudgeons of the hull, along with a piece of cutlass bearing, plus plastic washers that serve as spacers and bearings between the gudgeons of the hull and the gudgeons of the rudder. The topmost pin goes in last and is pinned through the topmost rudder gudgeon, along with its plastic washer bearings.
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The rudder has to be supported while this is going on, and it has to be able to be moved into position. I used a snatch block tied to the midpoint of the rudder and a line run to the running backstay winch on the pilothouse roof. An automobile jack and various pry bars and pieces of wood were used to get the rudder into position. Some trimming of the existing build up on the rudder gudgeon that mates with the upper skeg gudgeons was necessary, using a portable jig saw.
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When all the adjustment and trimming were done, the existing remnants of gudgeon build up on the rudder mated perfectly with the rudder pins, mounted in the hull’s gudgeons. Next a small (3 oz) mix of epoxy was used to prime any bare wood and also the gudgeons needing build up, then the silica/milled fiber filler was added to the remaining epoxy to make the usual mayonnaise consistency and that mix was troweled onto the rudder gudgeons and faired to the cutlass bearings that were already held in place by the rudder pins.
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The picture is of the starboard rudder in place and the epoxy build up. The cutlass bearings are the dark cylinders in line with the rudder pin, between the hull gudgeons. White disks above and below the cutlass bearings are plastic washers used as bearings between the gudgeons. The white line between the rudder and the cutlass bearings is the epoxy silica mix that builds up the inner part of the rudder gudgeons. Next the rudder will be removed and the cutlass bearings will be fiberglassed permanently to the rudder in the same position they are now with three layers of fiberglass rovings.