DaySailer.org Forum

Suddenly lost my steering on a fast beam reach in 15 knots on what has turned out to be our last sail of this season. Fortunately, we were able to recover the blade (thanks to a good bit of swimming by my daughter), but clearly I will need to either repair the existing head or build a completely new one. I am leaning toward the second option as the now broken one had issues anyway (the shape of the rounded cutout portion in between the cheeks did not allow the blade to rotate fully up). I am tempted to try building a head using aluminum panels as the new "cheeks," but hollow in between except for spacers and, perhaps, a portion of top of the current inner part of the head (what's that inner part called?) to extend above the new cheeks so I can use my current tiller. Has anybody built this sort of head or seen drawings of one? Any other advice?

If you look around a bit, we've had people discuss just the kind of design you mention.

Some older discussion may be "buried" in the DS1 and DSII forum sections - I'm happy to move any old thread to its appropriate "topical" domain for better archiving if you point it out.

PS: I take it that the rudder wasn't a stock rudder? In that case, if the blade is nicely profiled, it would make sense to keep the blade; if not, I'd plan on building a complete rudder (or buying one that has a profiled blade).