Steel

Mr. Palmas, the club's Nautical Director, helped me today with getting the rudder shaft and tube construction started. He took me to a scrap dealer who had an immense selection of used stainless steel parts. A fun place, and I found myself quite entertained by just picking up parts and imagining uses for it.

Despite the distraction we found an 1 inch stainless steel bar and a suitable tube. I was considering to use 1''1/4 inch, but found that quite an overkill. So I used 1 inch, just as specified. We also purchased some plates to weld onto the shaft, to anchor it into the wooden rudder blade. In total almost 8kg of stainless for R$ 130 (=USD 65).

Mr. Palmas will help to assemble the whole thing.

The trip to the steel dealer took a while, and so I had little time for actual building. But I managed to mark the deck camber. To do the radiused markings, I used a technique described in the Gudgeon Brothers book; two, slightly angled battens, with a pencil attached at the lower edge. The angle between the battens will determine the camber, as the pencil slides along from side to side along the frame.

I had actually payed a CAD-Designer to add the camber, which was not included in the original plans. But as things go, the designed camber does not fit to the actual result of the construction. Just by half an inch, but still. It is just no good any more. So I found that this was the easiest method. This is, once again, one of those problems which appear during boatbuilding, which are described in my previous post, Measures.