Join us for the second half of our composite rudder project.
As most of you already know, we built two new rudder blades for Paikea when we did our refit in Valencia, Spain in 2020. As the boat was on a cradle that was quite low to the ground, we were unable to remove the rudder stocks easily from the boat. There simply wasn’t enough room to pull the stocks out before they hit the ground. Instead, we made the decision to keep the existing stocks in place and build new rudder blades to fit. This compromise ended up costing us dearly as we lost one of our new rudders halfway through our Atlantic Crossing. The rudder shaft failed and snapped off leaving us to sail the remaining 800nm with only one rudder.
In the next year and a half, we sailed up and down the Caribbean Windward Island chain with only one rudder. We needed to find the time, money, and materials in order to design and make replacement ones. Shayne loves his data and had been collecting as much as he could in order to design a more efficient rudder for Paikea. He designed carbon fibre rudder stocks, which we got C-tech in New Zealand to build and send to us in Antigua. Once we had sourced most of the materials we required for the job in Martinique, we were able to commence building the rudders.
In our last video, you saw how we made the new rudder blank. Now it’s time to laminate and consolidate. We show how we laminated the outside skins, painted and fitted the rudder.
Here’s Part 2 of building our composite chain plates.