Home |
Search |
Today's Posts |
#31
|
|||
|
|||
I'm a big fan of skegs for safety and directional reasons. If you
ground by the stern with a spade rudder, usually it's game over. A skeg can help...maybe...to save it. Just to clarify: That is a fixed skeg shown on my proposed modification. On spade rudders: On power boats, I favor spade rudders. If the rudder has good clearance from the hull at the top, it will often remain functional after a grounding. The shaft may bend and the boat steer funny but it will still be steerable. With a bottom bearing, a little bit of bending will usually bind the whole thing up so if is useless. In a glass boat, it will be hard to make the skeg stiff enough to support the rudder. The whole thing can flex enough that the shaft will bend and the skeg will then bind the rudder. Even in metal, the sailboat type skeg will be hard to make sufficiently stiff. It doesn't take a lot of extra metal to make a rudder stock strong to be self supporting. If I were designing a boat that was not a weight critical racer, I would make the stock large enough to be a spade rudder. The skeg would then be structurally separate with just a line guard at the bottom. Grounding damage, which usually will bend the stock aft, would then leave the boat steerable in most cases. -- Roger Long |
Thread Tools | Search this Thread |
Display Modes | |
|
|
Similar Threads | ||||
Thread | Forum | |||
Hull Design & Displacement Hulls | General | |||
The future of yacht design - 10 myths scotched | ASA | |||
Hull Speed, Cal, O'Day 34 | ASA | |||
Crusing, hull speed, Cal 34 ft vs O'Day 34 | Cruising | |||
allied seawind 2 hull speed | General |