Rudder Alignment??

[Carla Dee]

Anyone have any tricks? We broke the connecting rod a while back and I have aligned the rudders by eye, but I'm sure there is a better way. I guess a tape measure would work. Anyone have any better ideas?

[baitkiller]

Pretty standard practice is: If they are wedge shaped set the inside planes at equal distance with a tape measure. If they are flat then even or slightly toed in.

I wonder if you could do the twin outboard trick. You know, take off the tie bar underway? I'd like to try that some time as I've had good luck doing it on outboards. I think it would work.

[tobnpr]

Probably overkill, but you got me thinking if I had to do it, I'd take my right angle laser (happen to have one-construction) and set one beam parallel to the transom and measure off the right angle beam to align the rudder to it.

Or any kind of right-angle jig that could be placed against the transom and used as a benchmark.

[rrrwel]

Iv' e done the tape measure toed in slightly and it was always a guess at best. What I found that works really well for me is to align the face of the rudder to be parallel with the shaft.

To do this get a piece of long metal stock that fits into the key way of your shaft. With the props off you will see that shafts are aligned just a bit off center of your rudders. The key way stock runs true on the shaft so just turn the shaft until the key way stock runs along side the flat face of your rudder. You can very easily line up the face of your rudder to be perfectly parallel with the shaft as the key way stock run past the face of the rudder.

My boats tracked very using this method. It made sense to me that because the shafts should be very much parallel your rudders could aligned using the shafts as a reference. If you wish to toe in slightly you can still that if you want but I found my boats ran better having the rudders parallel to the shafts which ultimately made them parallel to each other.

Hope that make sense. Good Luck

[TTaxi]

You could measure and mark 1/2 the distance between rudder shafts and square back to the transom-bottom centerline, then measure equal distances from there to the top aft rudder edges. Toe (aft-edge by my definition) -in tends to provide some stern lift/bow lower, toe-out = stern lower/bow higher. I believe many I/B mfgrs lean towards toe-out for better default bow-up safety down-sea, figuring tabs can give optional attitude adjustment when desired and that makes a fair amount of sense to me. My Phoenix specs 5* toe-out I believe, but since it takes considerable tabs down to varying degree for virtually all conditions I encounter I'd love to trial run the effect of 5* toe-in.

I wouldn't use the self-aligning method sometimes used with outboards though, as some toe beyond that neutral point in or out to create some more or less constant side-pressure is generally required to prevent rudder-"flutter" vibration.