Kaimusailing

The paint was shipped from New Jersey and scheduled to arrive the middle of the week. In the mean time I looked for other jobs to do. Every day I put a couple of coats of varnish on Trillium’s tiller. I decided to begin hanging Kaimu’s rudders. There was one pintle, which is a 1“ diameter stainless rod, normally used for propeller shaft, that had been bent in the collision with the jetty. I had left it in the workshop to be straightened, but nothing had been done to it in the months I had been away. I asked the boatyard owner if I could use the 55 ton hydraulic press to straighten the pintle.
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With his permission I began pressing the stainless rod. It would lay out straight, then spring back, I would have to over bend it to make it straight. How much to over bend was the question. It was taking a lot of time to bend it to a certain point, then see how straight it was afterwards, then bend it again a little further.
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Bob the mechanic came into the shop with a long shaft that was bent and more or less shoved me aside, “You’re gonna take all day, we’ve got to straighten this shaft right now”. He was working for someone and it’s his livelihood, so I stepped aside. Remarkably his shaft was straight in just one pressing. The steel in that shaft must be untempered. After he left I was able to finish. I cleaned up the shaft and my hands using that old Italian mechanics trick, wash with olive oil to dissolve grease and grime, then use soap and water.
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Back at Kaimu I set up an elaborate system of ropes, automobile jack, and a pry bar to lift the rudder into position and hold it there and allow it to be finely positioned for the pintles. Each rudder has a short top pintle that passes through the two gudgeons on the sternpost and the top gudgeon on the rudder. Down below is a longer pintle about 3 1/2 feet long that passes through the lower four gudeons on the sternpost and skeg, and the lower two gudgeons on the rudder. Getting it all lined up is tricky. There are also plastic washers that act as bearings in between the gudgeons.
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When the top of the rudder is in place, the top pintle is driven into the top gudgeon on the sternpost, then plastic washers are inserted into the space between the top gudgeon and the top rudder gudgeon. The pintle is driven further downward until it starts to exit the rudder’s top gudgeon, then washers are added there and it is driven down completely. At the same time the lower gudgeons are lined up. I used a ratchet drive extension to temporarily hold the lower gudgeons in alignment.
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Next the long lower pintle is positioned over the middle pair of gudgeons on the sternpost and driven down just like the upper pintle. After is passes through the middle sternpost gudgeons and the middle rudder gudgeon, it travels down to the lowest gudgeons. This was brutal work, hammering on the top of the pintle and it barely moving, all 3 1/2 feet of it.
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When I was done with that rudder, the port one, I began on the starboard rudder. This time I did not use a time consuming system of ropes, pulleys, and winches. I manhandled the rudder and tied it off in position. The bottom of the rudder was supported by the car jack. The top pintle went in more slowly than when I did the port rudder. I noticed that some additional fairing I did on the skeg was obstructing the rudder from being exactly in line. The multitool with straight blade trimmed the surface. I took material off the edge of the rudder and off the sternpost, not off any of the gudgeons. The gudgeons have to maintain their strength. Later the areas that were trimmed will be refaired with epoxy with fillers.
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The bottom pintle on the starboard rudder was particularly stubborn and it took 2 1/2 hours of pounding with a heavy hammer to get it driven home. Time for ibuprofen. The image is of the starboard rudder before all the pounding.
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