I finally threw in the towel and spent the bucks to buy the kits to upgrade the steering on my two PAs. They are 2010 vintage and had the steering knobs mounted to the seats. BTW, I had already put in the upgraded drums provided at no cost by Hobie. I carefully dismantled the old under the seat stuff just in case I wanted to put it back. The instructions in the kit direct you to essentially destroy much of it but it can be done without destroying it if wanted. (my advice now is to destroy it anyway, you don't want it!)
I have two of these boats which I bought at the same time new and have been sorely disappointed in both regarding the steering. One was worse than the other and I eventually discovered the cover that is over the rear steering drum was different on the worse of the two and it had been manually ground out to make room for the steering lines. It must have been an earlier version and the covers were made wrong and modified to fit! Fixed that but the steering was still not good. After three years, I gave up and shelled out the money for the two upgrade kits. Made me feel bad to spend that much on what should have been correct to begin with.
If you have the old steering, my advice is give it up. The upgrade is outstanding. It is night and day different.
By the way, the routing for the right side line is better run between the two rear most scuppers vs. what is shown in the instructions. You will notice that when you do the install and it is not a big deal to correct that. The install takes about 1.5 hours for a perfectionist who doesn't like drilling holes in a high dollar plastic boat.
The only downside is the exorbitant cost for the kit. At least Hobie should have made these available to the original purchasers at cost since we shelled out the big bucks for a very poor first edition design. To make matters worse, I was stung twice.
