Home Made Tiller Tamer for 15 Bucks!

Jeff Asbury

Principal Partner
Hey Fellow Sailors & Friends,

Check this out. Rather than spending over a $100. bucks for a Forspar tiller extension and lock, I came up with this solution for about $15. bucks. There was already a bronze oar lock mounted on the side of the cockpit when I purchased my 1973 Ericson 27. I never knew what it was for so I applied it to my solution for a Tiller Tamer. I bought a Paint Roller Extension, Roller Handel and a U Bolt with two wing nuts. I put a piece of plastic tubing over the U Bolt to protect the tiller. I drilled two holes in the Roller Handel for the U bolt and one in the end of the Roller Extension. Enough explanation. Check out the photos. This will hold my tiller on corse for quite a while.

Jeff
 

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ignacio

Member III
Blogs Author
How did this work out?

Hi Jeff,

How did this work out? Still using this solution, or have you replaced with something else?

Hey Fellow Sailors & Friends,

Check this out. Rather than spending over a $100. bucks for a Forspar tiller extension and lock, I came up with this solution for about $15. bucks. There was already a bronze oar lock mounted on the side of the cockpit when I purchased my 1973 Ericson 27. I never knew what it was for so I applied it to my solution for a Tiller Tamer. I bought a Paint Roller Extension, Roller Handel and a U Bolt with two wing nuts. I put a piece of plastic tubing over the U Bolt to protect the tiller. I drilled two holes in the Roller Handel for the U bolt and one in the end of the Roller Extension. Enough explanation. Check out the photos. This will hold my tiller on corse for quite a while.

Jeff
 

Glyn Judson

Moderator
Moderator
Po' man's tiller tamer.

Jeff, Great solution for your tiller, clearly the result of imaginative thinking on your part. I'm reminded of the days when looking for a similar fix on our boat, but mine wasn't nearly as clever as yours and I was near broke back then anyway. I secured one end of a short length of light line to a cleat on the coaming adjacent to the end of the centered tiller, took a number of wraps, maybe five or six around the tiller with the same line that I then cleated on the other coaming. The result was a somewhat taught line spanning the cockpit that allowed me to micro-adjust the tiller by closing my hand around the wrap and rotating it one way or the other. I'd like to think that I came up with that idea but alas, I'm sure thousands of sailors beat me to it hundreds of years earlier. But it was still pretty cool and worked as I hoped it would. Glyn Judson, E31 hull #55, Marina del Rey, CA
 

Jeff Asbury

Principal Partner
Thanks Glyn & Harvey,

Poor Man is right! :egrin:

Man that's a old post. No I no longer use that set up. I think about a year or two later I purchased a Simrad TP22 Tiller Pilot. That tiller tamer rig I came up with worked pretty good if I got the right reach. I think I have that thing still in the garage. It really helped me out because I single hand so much. It could hold Her into the wind long enough to get my main up.

It's interesting that this old post came up because I recently purchased a used whisker pole. I was surfing the web to see how much money I saved by buying this used Forspar pole and I ran across a site where some one fashioned a paint roller extension into a whisker pole. Check this out, it's pretty clever: http://www.lazyka.com/LazyKa/content/mods/Mod_WhiskerPole.htm



Simrad TP22 Tiller Pilot.
http://www.defender.com/product.jsp?path=-1|344|302025|296563|321072|1018466&id=336601
 

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