aaronwestward
Learning to sail
My tiller has several pretty serious cracks along the laminate, with some water intrusion under the chipped and aged varnish. I'm going to give a shot at restoring it by removing varnish, regluing, and revarnishing, but I'd like to get a replacement tiller in the meantime, since this might take a while. Then one or the other would end up as a backup tiller.
I see a lot of cheapish tillers on the Internet, including some that say they're good for an Ericson 27. The problem is that I don't really believe them, for two reasons:
1) The cheap Internet tillers are specified in terms of the "rise" of a curve between two parallel lines. But this isn't really the shape of my tiller. It's more of a C-shape, which almost no actual rise; if you draw a line between the boltholes, it almost intersects the tip of the other end. Presumably the curve is just to avoid the cockpit seats.
2) The butt of the tiller seems to be something close to 1.75 inches across, but it's not exact, and it seems any variation would be a huge problem in terms of fitting into my existing rudder thingie--like, it wouldnt fit, or it would have play. The Internet tiller places I've seen just specify it as 2", which doesn't seem right at all. I don't have any kind of woodworking capability, so if it doesn't fit exactly, it's pretty much not going to work.
Does anyone know where I could get a tiller online that I could have a reasonable confidence that it would actually work out-of-box? Ideally, it would have the boltholes predrilled, so I wouldn't have to deal with the drilling and sealing.
I see a lot of cheapish tillers on the Internet, including some that say they're good for an Ericson 27. The problem is that I don't really believe them, for two reasons:
1) The cheap Internet tillers are specified in terms of the "rise" of a curve between two parallel lines. But this isn't really the shape of my tiller. It's more of a C-shape, which almost no actual rise; if you draw a line between the boltholes, it almost intersects the tip of the other end. Presumably the curve is just to avoid the cockpit seats.
2) The butt of the tiller seems to be something close to 1.75 inches across, but it's not exact, and it seems any variation would be a huge problem in terms of fitting into my existing rudder thingie--like, it wouldnt fit, or it would have play. The Internet tiller places I've seen just specify it as 2", which doesn't seem right at all. I don't have any kind of woodworking capability, so if it doesn't fit exactly, it's pretty much not going to work.
Does anyone know where I could get a tiller online that I could have a reasonable confidence that it would actually work out-of-box? Ideally, it would have the boltholes predrilled, so I wouldn't have to deal with the drilling and sealing.
