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January 1, 2002 Issue
January 15, 2002 Issue
January 1, 2002
How to Make a Fiberglass Rudder
By Robb WhiteWell, in the first place, a fiberglass rudder is a good thing. So is a wood rudder, but sometimes it just ain't appropriate, like on an inboard planing boat. Traditionally such a thing is made of cast bronze. I love a piece of bronze in its place, but that's a heavy, easily bent, thing to steer a boat with. A fiberglass rudder is better.
Fiberglass will bend but it'll spring back just like it was. It is possible to build a fiberglass rudder much thinner than a bronze rudder and still have it plenty strong. The only trouble with it is the shank. A fiberglass shank wants to abrade the rubber shaft bearing and the top bushing and might make that horrible dust where it touches any metal. One way to avoid that is to build a stainless steel armature with a piece of schedule 40 stainless pipe and some other stuff welded onto it to lay up the fiberglass around.
If you hit something with such a rig, you might bend the pipe and bust the fiberglass. Even if you don't, water will run down in the inevitable crack around the pipe and freeze and the crack will gradually get wider and wider until it will hold enough water to bust something. I know a man who took the whole tiller off his moored sailboat for the winter to save the varnish job, and when he put it back on in the spring, he couldn't turn the rudder. The pipe had filled up with water and frozen and swollen up in the hole. It was a bad problem. Except for the abrasion, it would be much better if the whole thing was fiberglass to begin with. What I did this last time is, so far, the best. I built a fiberglass rudder with a fiberglass shank but I encased the shank in a thin stainless steel tube. I believe it is a good rudder. I can't bend it beyond its elastic limit (considerable) by clamping the blade in the vise and pulling on the shank. Even though the shank is only an inch in diameter, I can't break it even with an extension pipe to pull on. When you think about it, a I" fiberglass fishing rod is hard to break. Just imagine what it would be like if it was solid. Here is how I did it. First, I searched for the thinnest piece of 1" OD tubing I could find. Guess where it was? A lot of these people over here on this island where I hang out are likely to demonstrate their dominion over nature in the most extravagant ways. If their battery dies while trying to crank their car after salt crys-tals have blown up under the hood (ain't going to do that motor a bit of good, Maybelline) for the three months since they last came down, they just put a new battery in it and leave the old one at the dump (a horrible place).
If they have a beer party, they don't want to go to the trouble to haul the empty keg back to the mainland. YOU Ought to see my collection. Inside of those kegs is a beautiful, foodgrade stainless steel ball, a delightful stainless compression spring, and the most marvelously thin, stainless steel 1" OD tube. I also scavenged a most wonderful battery, looked like a six-pack of beer. All it took was a little charging and it cranked my bulldozer for four years, even when I had to bleed the injectors, and it takes a real battery to do that.
Dang, I got sort of sidetracked from explaining about that rudder, so while I am off the track, I might as well tell you what I think we ought to do to fix the airline/terrorist situation. I believe that the solution is to have an armed air marshall sitting up there in the front of everybody like a school teacher facing her class, except with her little shotgun across her knees. It doesn't seem like these sons of bitches include women in their plans, except as victims, and using women for the job ought to cut down on the chances that we might hire the wrong man. The only other qualifications would be to make sure she knew how to shoot (and hit) and had the resolution to do so. I know several women who already have that capability.
Of course, our air marshal would have to learn how to say, "Please raise your hand if you want to go to the bathroom," in about five or six languages. She could sit there by the locked cockpit door with her little pump .410 so, in case some fool (which, I think suicidal terrorism is the ultimate act of a fool) with a plastic box cutter decided to overstep himself, she could put the rooty-toot-toot to him with some seven-and-a-half shot like Frankie did Johnny, or maybe like Rosie did the rivet, to keep him from advancing to the cockpit. I say seven-and-a-half shot because we wouldn't want to gratify him by killing him. You know, as an aside, it is convenient not to have to say he-or-she when referring to the enemy.
I just thought of something else. It wouldn't hurt a bit if our air marshal wore some lipstick and maybe a little mascara and a dab of fingernail polish, possibly on her toenails, too, peeking out of her high-heeled sandals, even some steel belted radial panty hose or perhaps not. Certainly a very short skirt and a shirt with a pretty wide expanse of chest gleaming out the top would help to alert some of the passengers to her pres- ence. If she were to notice a sneaky-looking man glaring with malevolence (knowing our enemy, she could ignore the ill will of women), well, that man just wouldn't get to go the bath- room is all. It wouldn't make a martyr out of him, but it might help to keep him off of our airplanes in the future.
Now that I got that off my chest, back to the fiberglass rudder. The way I did it was to carve a mold of the blade into two boards, with half a tunnel in each to hold the shank tube straight. I shot it with a little 3M 77 aerosol contact cement and covered it with Saran Wrap, sprayed that and laid out a layer of 4-oz. fiberglass fabric in the cavity of both boards. I cut a graduated series of woven roving patches that I figured would fill the cavity completely when the boards were put together and clamped. Then I unraveled enough woven roving to make a head of hair for a hideous blonde Rapunzel. Then I doubled those strands and tied a strong, thin polyethylene strap around the bight. I put on my gloves and NIOSH fume mask and stuffed the whole mess down into a can of catalyzed polyester resin. Working fast, I threaded the strap through the beer keg tube and pulled Rapunzel through.
Dang, it was nasty looking, would have even grossed out Jim Thayer but I didn't get a drop on me of the floor and it worked perfectly. I had already tried the fiberglass in the tube, dry, so that I knew it would go in there, and I had polished the inside of the entrance of the tube so it wouldn't snag.
When I had pulled the bight out of the top end of the tube enough, I had a disgusting mop of dripping fiberglass hanging out the other end. I quickly, but calmly, laid up the woven roving in both sides of the mold with the leftover juice from the can and, when I had both sides sloppy full, I laid the tube in the groove and, poking with a stick, arranged the mop so that the strands of fiberglass went every which-a-way among the contents of one cavity. Then, using the same motions as a New York Pizza Ace, I slapped the two boards together and screwed them tight Godamighty, it was awful looking. About nine bucks worth of polyester resin squeezed out the edges of the mold and ran off the plastic on my bench and onto the floor. I just cut and ran went fishing, caught five very nice speckled perch (black crappie, Pomoxis nigromaculatus, if you must know).
After I got back and got the fish cleaned, salted, peppered, and mealed up ready to fry, I snuck back in there. You know, it is much better to powder your fish a good bit before-hand so the meal (I like fine ground Mexican tortilla meal, "masa harina") will have time to soak up the juice. It'll stay on the filets better like that and the vaporizing of the water in the meal will repel the oil (peanut, clean and hot) before it can soak into the meat and they'll fry out to be less greasy. Drain them on a screen and they'll turn out right palatable. I hate to keep getting off the subject like this, but I need to disseminate all this information before it gets lost and, not only am I a fair boatbuilder, I am a damn good cook. Ain't much with pastries and casseroles, but I do know how to deal with single objects like a fish.
Meanwhile, while the masa was getting right, back in the shop the stench was still over-powering my powerful ventilating fan, but the resin was hard. I snatched the whole mess off the bench, plastic and all, and ran out into the yard with it. After I took out the screws, I had to saw all around the edges to find the crack to pry the boards off my rudder. Boy was it slick, just as cute as anything, neatest little air-foil to it. All I had to do to it was scrape a little resin off the beer keg shank sleeve and trim the edges. I have had enough polyester experience not to be worried about the mess on the floor of the shop. It all came off the concrete in one piece. That crap won't stick to anything but itself (and fiberglass). and even then ev-erything has to be just exactly right. I better pin my tiller fitting on there, or before long I'll just be turning the tube while the rudder wiggles down and falls out. Good thing I thought of that, ain't it?
January 15, 2002
See you next month
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