Rudder Pintle failure

[David Smith]

Hi gang,

What a great weekend of sailing. We towed the boat up to the kid's
cottage near Honey Harbour in the Muskoka's. Tricky sailing as the
winds swirl arround many little islands in the South Bay area. Great
fun and quite challenging. We dumped it twice - once through not being
nimble enough on an unannounced gibe (gybe?), and the next time close
hauled being simply overpowered by the wind! Awesome, and the lake was
warm and inviting. No problems righting the boat.

The rudder pintle failed where the nasty plastic bit is press fitted
to the stainless rod. No idea where the plastic bit is and we were
more fortunate than we deserved as we did not loose our rudder.

Number one son-in-law provided the fix (two tie wraps and a rusty nut)
which got us through the week-end. That is two of us have experienced
the same failure. I guess Laser has a design fault that needs fixing.
I am off to the machine shop tomorrow to get something threaded on and
threadlocked in place.

How was everyone else's week-end? I will post a few more pics soon. I
am enormously pleased with the Bahia and we are having a blast with
it. Club racing on Friday week. Can't wait!

Cheers,

Dave.

These pictures were sent with Picasa, from Google.
Try it out here: http://picasa.google.com/

[Christian Mitchell]

Okay - this is scary. Any warning signs?

On Jul 13, 5:16 pm, "David Smith" <david.smith...@googlemail.com>
wrote:

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[Jeff Fedor]

none for us... only that it happened during high winds which, hey who needs a functioning rudder then :-)

j

[David Smith]

No warning signs for us either. The thing just wasn't there when I did an inspection between sailing sessions. I have no idea when and how and why it failed.

 

I have been sailing solo on Lake Ontario this afternoon (retirement IS all it is cracked up to be). I do not think I will rig the genny while solo for a while. We saw too many ways to get it wrong on the weekend and alone in Lake O would not be very funny with a major fix to carry out. Great fun sailing with 2 sails though -  until the great calm came while I was half way to Niagara! (Well, perhaps not quite). Forecast said westerly 10 knots (it was) backing to Southerly 10. Backed and died is more like it! Took for ever to get home. I will take the motor (3.5 Merc) tomorrow. The cotter pin fix is rock solid on the pintle (or is it the gudgeon?) so I am happy.

 

It is not my place to tell others what to do, but I would seriously recommend fixing the gudgeon pin head to the pin in such a way that it can not come off!

 

Cheers all.

 

Dave

 

 

 

2008/7/13 David Smith <david.s...@googlemail.com>:

[Jeff Fedor]

On Tue, Jul 15, 2008 at 6:37 PM, David Smith <david.s...@googlemail.com> wrote:

 

It is not my place to tell others what to do, but I would seriously recommend fixing the gudgeon pin head to the pin in such a way that it can not come off!

 

Bah! that's the whole point of having a group like this...  no point in everyone having the same learning pains. I'm stopping in at the dealer tomorrow and we'll do a similar repair. Boat should be splashing down in Georgian Bay as we speak and we'll be sailing it up there for a while but we'll get it machined as soon as we bring her home.

j

Bahia hull # 492