I looked up some photos of the Elizabethian whipstaff steering gear, and I read something a little alarming. Several of the descriptions mentioned that it was call “whipstaff” from the lever’s tendency to whip about when a wave hit the rudder and the action travelled through to the helsman.
Do you see any possibility or threat of waves hitting Footy rudders and possibly stripping servo gears? Especially for those boats like you have at Guildford, and Grahams group in Lake Michigan.
I’ve sailed Tanto with my whipstaff system in whitecaps and foot high waves at three foot intervals on Seventh lake in the Adirondack mountains. This water was too rough to sail M boats in. We call it the “washing machine” and I don’t venture out in my kayak when the water is like that. My Tanto displayed no loss of control or directional instability, or problems tacking at will. I think that Footy rudder’s areas are too small to effected by wave action and Footies are of too light displacement to provide the inertia or resistance to leeway of a full size sit-on boat in pounding cross waves. So, I would say that having whipstaff steering on a Footy will not be subject to whipping as you describe in the above post. Footies are great heavy weather boats.
Can you get enough rudder throw? How many degrees would you expect from a whipstaff system? I don’t use much myself, except as a brake to stop the boat, but there are people (noobs) out there that expect model yachts to make square turns- I’ve been told that even my ODOM didn’t have enough rudder throw :mad: like 30 or 40 deg either way wasn’t enough.
It is very useful information to some extent. Please help me out regarding this topic going on. Can some one tell me to what exact direction discussion is going on now?
Oh by the way ~ why do you want to put advertising on the bottom of your posts??? Its not really the done thing to try and sell to members - advice yes - selling no.
I know you are new to this forum - so you may wish to consider reformatting your signature
I have made what seems to be an even simpler mechanism for tiller steering. The photo is looking down into the stern from port midships. The axis of the servo arm is parallel to the rudder shaft, while the tiller itself is a short length of springy wire epoxied into the carbon rudder shaft. The loop on the end of the servo arm is free to rotate in the hole in the plastic arm. This current model seems to have a bit too much play for precise steering, so the next edition will have the hole in the loop just large enough to take the springy wire.
Better yet, Dick bounced them. It’s a new form of forum spam – you write a generic reply (“That’s interesting, maybe you could tell me more”) and then put the spam link in the .sig
Never fear, Dick and Earl, the whack-a-mole brothers, are on the job
My ingenious if retiring friend Mark Holcroft has come up with what has to be the most compact version of them all. The servo sits against the transom with its shaft vertical. A horizontal arm with a forked and is attached to the servo and sticks out through the transom - like a tiller in reverse. A pin on the trailing edge of the rudder engages in the forked end.
For pure space saving this has to be pretty much unbeatable. :devil3::zbeer::zbeer:
Oh Angus shame on you lobbing coconuts at your employee might just be considered harassment but knowing Mark he might just throw them back at you ~ DUCK ~ Oh no thats Garys boat
These are all very ingenious ideas, but they all are built in place. One of the chief reasons for my incorporating whipstaff steering in my boats is that it is the quickest and easiest way to uncouple the rudder linkage in the event that you need to swap out the r/c in the boat. It is important to be able to do this fast because there is not much time between heats to effect repairs, even the five minutes allowed in the US is much less time than it sounds like.
So you envision yourself unpinning the rudder blade and removing it with the tiller arm, then inserting the new tiller arm into the hole, and pinning the new rudder blade in place? It sounds like it should take only a minute!
Tomo, just the opposite. Since I travel to races, I want to be able to remove the r/c gear quickly. If you look at the thread, “Whipstaff my Way”, you will see that my r/c gear is mounted on a removable tray. This way if a servo or receiver bags out on me I can swap in a new tray with identical gear and be sailing again quickly. I then can determine what the source of the problem was after the racing is over. I much prefer to travel to a race and race than to be a spectator.
The ability to disconnect the linkage between the rudder and the servo has to be easy and fast. By easy I mean that you have to be able to accomplish this task with numb fingers in strong winds and inclement conditions. By fast I mean that the whole operation should be undertaken and finished well within the 5 minute hold generally granted at AMYA events.
