Commander 147

[ebb]

Nice!

Will you be able to line up the long bolt?
A338 has one long bolt that essentially makes the stemfitting impossible to be torn off (without taking the whole nose with it. )
Could say the stemfitting does a secondary job clamping stem to deck together.
Also has the two lower bolts that only go thru the stem.
Our stem fitting is a great design!

The plug/bulkhead you have there imco could be tabbed to the hull to insure the upgrade does as you say: hold everything together better.

Bet you had a great time working up in there!!!!!


Really enjoy your photos and work!

[Commander 147]

and you will get a feel for what it was like working up there in the point of the bow. I can't wait to start on the recore. I will actually for the first time be able to stand in an upright position to do the job at hand.

Ebb the first pictures may not have been easy to see but I did glass the trapazoid to the deck and the hull. The first picture below is the templates I used to cut the biax that I used. The Y shaped one went in first and the top dark brown part is on the bottom of the deck, the middle light brown part is attached to the trapazoid plug and the bottom darker brown part is attached to the hull where the bolts for the stem head go through. The smaller template was for the second piece of biax that tied the plug to the sides of the hull.

The second picture below shows the long bolt in place so you can get an idea of how it all fits together.

[Commander 147]

Both of the tillers that came my commander were replacements and neither one worked very well. One was only about 4" longer than the original but instead of a slight rise it had a drop in it and it was a knee knocker. The other while it had a similar rise to the origianl it was about 12" too long. It took up a lot of cockpit space to use it. So tonight I cut up one of the old combing boards and resawed it into strips 5/16" thick. I built a jig to match the profile in the manual and glued the first one up. I figure it can't hurt to have a spare so I'm going to make two while I'm doing it.

If anyone wants the jig when I'm done with it and is willing to pay the UPS to get it let me know and it's yours.

[Commander 147]

Just blissfully blundering along like I have never built anything before confident what I'm doing is going to turn out just right.......NOT.....

I know better than to build a jig and do a glue up before testing my template to verify it's really what I want. But did I do that?????? NO

So tonight after work I removed the glue up from the jig (first picture below) and was getting ready to surface the two faces so I could lay the template on it and mark the layout for the bandsaw, I all of a sudden realize I never bolted the template into the rudder head to make sure I was going to be happy with the final result. When I did my heart sunk..... I was sure after looking at the two tillers that came with my commander and looking at the layout of the original in the manual that I would be happy with the original. And that is why I blissfully proceeded without doing what I would normally do and test every step along the way to make sure I liked the direction I was going. But when I bolted it in I realized it was not going to end up at a comfortable height for me and I was going to have to go back to square one.

The second picture below is the two tiller templates bolted into the tiller head. The higher one is the one based on the manual and the lower one is the one I'm going to start making now.

[ebb]

A master woodworker, famous for his furniture, once said to me:

It's all how you go from one mistake to your next mistake.

[Commander 147]

I needed that....

[Ariel 109]

Don't forget to account for some flatting out of the tiller's curves when you take it out of the form.

All the work you've done on your boat is first class.

Ben