Sailinagin wrote:
Since I got the boat last year I have always felt something was wrong with my tiller arms/rudder alignment.
I have swapped the upper castings/arms to see if they were reversed, to no avail. I have the older castings. With both of my rudder adjusters fully extended the distance between the aft edge of my rudders (in the down position) is 81 1/4", the forward edge is 80 3/4". A 1/2" difference may create the toe in I have heard spoken of here but it makes no sense that both of my tiller adjusters are fully extended and I am still a 1/2" short of being able to make them paralell.
If I "eyeball" my tiller arms from the rear looking forward (as the rudders are down) one arm has only an extremely slight bend to the middle of the boat. The other is dead straight. I thought maybe the tiller cross bar was short but have compared it to aonther's and they are the same.
Can you see a noticeable bend in both of your tiller arms?? Any thoughts?
Were you able to correct this problem? For what it's worth, I have the old style rudder system and both of my tiller arms curve inward. Do you know how your boat has two pieces of deck grip on the rear section of your hulls? Well, the curvature of my tiller arms is such that, when the system is centered, the front of both arms line up directly above the center edge of the inner strip of deck grip (if that makes any sense). My tiller cross bar is the same length as yours (75") and my toe-in measures roughly 1/8" (81 5/8" rear, 81 1/2" front, but this isn't exact since the leading edge of the rudders are fatter than the rear and it's difficult to measure by yourself). Even with only 1/8" toe-in I do still have more weather helm than I would like.