It was listed as a brand new, unused, 30 year old, laser rudder, just what I wanted!
Pictures say it best:
I had to modify the anodized aluminium cheeks by cutting away a section from the leading edge under the upper pintle to allow for clearance of the cast nose molding of the canoe.
I cut 30mm off the Coleman, cast aluminium, nose molding to allow the closest possible fulcrum point to the stern of the canoe. I then drilled a perpendicular hole one oversize from the pintle pin. The hole drilled to one side is for the control line that keeps tension on the rudder blade in the down position. The line is secured by a cleat forward, close to my sitting position, on the gunwale.
The lower Gudgeon is from a wrecked rudder off my old X Class yacht from the 1960's, from my "just in case it might come in handy one day" box. As you can see I bent the cheek plates around to the shape of the canoe stern. I bolted the assembly with 1/4" stainless steel machine screws, washers and nuts to the Ram X plastic hull. I shaped a pine block to fill the void created by the offset, female, gudgeon flukes. The black compound you see is a polyurethane "dubbin" adhesive used by the car industry to glue in car windshields, it's the toughest, meanest adhesive/sealant known to man.
The lovely mahogany tiller is from an old P Class yacht which I kept from a restoration project on my son Robert's 3rd sail boat in the 1990's ( again from the same "handy" source). The tiller did not fit perfectly into the rudder head stock to begin with so some slight modification was needed for it to fit snugly.
The tiller extension is from a window cleaners, telescopic extension handle.
I connected it to the tiller with a small stainless steel swivel, one end of which I bent out flat to create a saddle to bolt the assembly on to the underside of the tiller. This keeps the extension tube low, under the up sweeping curve of the tiller.
The cheek plate on the extension tube is cut from one side of a spinnaker pole fitting from a small sail boat, just the right diameter dish section to allow bolting to the side of the tube.
The tiller is secured in place with a stainless steel locating pin drilled to fit through both the folded stainless steel cap of the tiller stock and the tiller itself. I always retain small items like these with a little lanyard so as not to loose them.
How does it handle you ask?
I launched Lookfar last night on the high tide. There was a 6 knot southerly, I sheeted in the tiny sail, dipped the starboard lee board, pulled on the rudder blade control line and the little canoe came alive, perfectly balanced, a delight to sail.
The rudder has transformed the handling of this little sailboat. Upwind no rudder is needed but downwind the hull wants to wander so the rudder helps to make the hull track straight. The new rudder makes a big difference to tacking and gibing control as well.
My old friend Mitchell says of my Lookfar project, "It's funny how the simplest, cheapest, smallest, closest to the water boats often provide the best boating." He should know, he showed me how!
Thanks for reading my blog.
Harmen