My sailboat rudder design

Hello everyone. This is a design of my rudder from my sailboat with the top bearing I would like to place in order to hopefully improve the stirring quality and solve some other problems along the way. I thought I’d share! Feel free to ask any questions or give tips for how to improve it or tips or tricks that may make my life easier in the future.
Cheers!





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Beautiful design @Ion ! As an extra, you could also share this design with us via the ‘Share’ option in Shapr3D. Then everyone can admire your design in 3D view :slight_smile:

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Are you actually redesigning the rudder profile? Or is it just for visualisation. If you want to go technical… you’ll need to source some NACA profiles to suit the boat. It’s easier than it looks and you can get the bearing just right.

How to build a rudder for your boat - Practical Boat Owner

Thanks I will check how its done and ill try it.

Hello, thanks for the info Chris, practical boat owner is one of my favorite magazines and I buy 1 almost every month! The design of the rudder is just a representation of the original, but I will try to find out what NACA profiles are and check if I can make it better. The actual reason for this design is mostly fun because the rest of the repair work can be done just by knowing the overall width of the blade. The problem is actually at the Inox sleeves on the rudder shaft. They were fixed in place with epoxy and there is an ever so slight axial deviation between the two of them and that creates problems after a while. The continuous stress eats away on the top and bottom bearing on opposite sides progressively making it harder to steer and possibly dangerous after some point. The bearing now are just simply made from Inox and Teflon, what you see in the design is one of Jefa’s models that I’m thinking I might get. I have already found a lathe big enough to fit the rudder so I can get rid of the old Inox sleeves and put new ones that will be properly aligned. :crossed_fingers:

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