Below is a shot of my existing rudder from 15 years ago. At last haul out it was looking sad. Pointy ends of third and second plank were twisting away from the plane of the rudder. The trailing edge had been sanded down to 1/2” and was starting to crack along the grain. Time to replace it. I don’t know what condition the shaft is in. My dad ran aground in western Lake Erie in the early 70’s. He landed on a chunk of limestone in big waves near Put In Bay. The current rudder was fabricated near Cleveland, and is a 3 plank version of the inboard rudder with the plug. It has lasted 50 years or so. I’m making a straight shaft version for my outboard Ariel. There are other versions of mahogany rudders on the “rudder” thread. This one is a little different in the way the third plank is connected to the second using angled drifts. I took lots of pictures of the steps I used— our forum members always want more Pics. Did most of the work in the sun outside in January— finished just before the Texas freeze / power outage.
Now that I’m about finished, I can say this turned out to be a fun project and I don’t have great woodworking skills. But it could have been a nightmare if I didn’t make some decisions to follow a path of least resistance. The key area of “resistance” is the drilling of long straight holes! When it came down to it and after doing some practice drilling and getting input from the Wooden Boat Forum, where members build a lot of rudders using drifts instead of bolts, I decided not to attempt to drill holes longer than 10” and specifically, did not want to try to drill from opposite directions and hope that the hole would meet in the middle. A previous poster did this on a two plank rudder and mentioned it was like getting the English Channel Chunnel Tunnel to meet up when drilling from England and France. Nope, not for me. I don’t have the skills or confidence to try it after seeing how long holes start to wander on both the X and Y axis. And mahogany is too expensive to make a mistake.
But my current rudder has drifts (essentially long honkin’ 3/8” diameter nails) holding trailing plank 3 to middle plank 2, and it hasn’t come apart after 50 years. Ebb doesn’t like the idea of “cheese holes” for bolt end nuts and he says its the residual “carpenter” in him, but path of least resistance says to use them for nuts attaching threaded rod to the shaft. Otherwise longer holes means better skills than I have. Other factor is you don’t have cut outs for nuts in the rudder trailing edge. If you have the equipment and the skills, go for it (longer holes).
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