San Juan 21 Class Association

Hey all,

Well, Snowmageddon has struck here in Raleigh. I am getting cabin fever, so I thought I would do a quick write up on what I did to my rudder should anyone else need the info. Mine has been a kick up rudder and since I was refurbishing the boat, I had to do the rudder as well. I decided to put it on a diet and cut out large chunks of the cheek plates and sliced the teak plank up accordingly. I added an additional bolt and used aluminum square tubes for spacers where the plank was no longer there. When I took off the cheeks (aluminum), where they touched the pintels (stainless) had been pitted and oxidized. I sanded and stripped everything down to bare metal and primed with an aluminum spray primer I found at an autoparts store. couple of coats of primer, then finished it with the brightsides I used on the boat. the rudder got sanded, filled, fared and painted. the tiller was weathered teak, but a light sanding made it look new again along with some teak oil. when i put it back together, I used an old bicycle inter tube to create some rubber gaskets between the pintels and the cheek plates to avoid future oxidation. I also used an empty orange juice container to make some plastic washer-like spacers between the rudder and the cheek plates with hopes to reduce wear. the piece that really worked out was an impulse buy at home depot. I needed to replace the bungee cord for the kick up rudder, so I grabbed one that looked long enough and looked for some bull ring clips. couldn't find the clips, so I was going to just fashion something else. When I got to assembling it though, I realized the bungee cord fit perfectly and the one I grabbed had an excellent mechanism to allow it to be adjustable on the fly. see the pics below.