Delaminating wooden tiller - advice pls

Tintin

Tintin

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Hi ,

My wooden tiller is delaminating on the curves.

I reckon what I need to do is slightly open up between the laminates, inject some sort of glue (suggestions?), then clamp it together.

What do you reckon? What sort of glue?

thx
chris
 
frankly its a hiding to nothing.

My late friend/ owner/skipper used to take his home every year and try to re-glue it. but it got progressively worse. Eventually to the point that it was in serious danger of breaking.
His son fitted a new tiller as soon as he inherited the boat. ( I'd have replaced it years sooner. )

Those very curved laminated tillers that Westerly used to fit are an appalling design from an engineering point of view.

Trouble is you cannot clean out all the old glue, and the only way to make a good glued joint in wood is the put new glue onto clean surfaces and clamp up tight.

Try by all means with an epoxy glue perhaps or one of the modern polyurethanes but don't expect a great deal of sympathy if one day when you are out in gale it breaks.
 
reddragon2 said:
Hi ,

My wooden tiller is delaminating on the curves.

I reckon what I need to do is slightly open up between the laminates, inject some sort of glue (suggestions?), then clamp it together.

What do you reckon? What sort of glue?

thx
chris
Click to expand...

Mine began to do that and I was lucky enough to be able to completely separate the laminations using boiling water and a thin strip of steel (It took several applications of boiling water to do it). After they had dried I sanded the mating surfaces clean, roughened them and re-glued using epoxy.

It's obviously best if you can separate the laminations so that you can get a clean surface for glueing but if you can't perhaps you can clean out the gaps with a thin saw blade and inject epoxy or a polyurethane like Balcotan. If you use Balcotan you will need to clamp the laminations tightly together because it expands and will push them apart.
 
You may want to consider stripping all the varnish off, and then when you have reglued it, seal it with Coelan. Being flexible it will cope with a fair amount of expansion before any water gets in and makes things worse.
 
I have repaired such tillers, from a Westerly, a while back now.

If the wood is ok then its fine to do. What you need to do is to open up one side, so if you have five laminates spring away 2 of them and then clean up and reglue using the other three as the former. Us a west system epoxy for wood, this will penetrate if warmed a little, I believe.

I guess you wont know if its worth doing until you open it up, but its worth a go. A new one is very expensive, a lot of work goes into them.

Very pleasing tot he eye and time has proved that they work well. Westerly used a lot of them to great success.

Besides, it will give you something to do over the next month...
 
VicS said:
frankly its a hiding to nothing.

My late friend/ owner/skipper used to take his home every year and try to re-glue it. but it got progressively worse. Eventually to the point that it was in serious danger of breaking.
His son fitted a new tiller as soon as he inherited the boat. ( I'd have replaced it years sooner. )

Those very curved laminated tillers that Westerly used to fit are an appalling design from an engineering point of view.
Click to expand...

Agreed on all counts. My Jouster has a straight laminated Westerly tiller with which I have been fighting for years. It's now a collection of flat strips, joined at one end, and will be replaced by a new ash tiller in the next few weeks.

The basic problem is that they are made out of two different woods (duh) with very different properties. In particular, they expand and contract with dampness/dryness at very different rates, and this produces more than enough force to delaminate.

The only success I had that lasted more than a season was to split the whole thing into strips, clamp and glue - with urea-formaldehyde (Cascamite), I think. Even that only lasted a few years, looking progressively worse and more ridged along the sides.
 
Would have to agree with VicS on this one. If it delaminating, it has had it. I know from bitter experience what can happen when a laminated tiller gives out. We were swept into overfalls off Start Point and had a frantic few minutes getting the boat back under control. Replacement should be on safety grounds and is not prohibitively expensive. A new one should come in under £200. You should contact Tony Mackillican - he could probably sort you out with a new one. Lead time is no more than 4 weeks. Look him up on the web at www.tonymackillican.co.uk
Good Luck!
 
Fully agree with VicS and others. I repaired mine several times, patching in new wood where the lighter coloured one had rotted away. This despite storing it below when not in use, all winter, etc. Finally, although it looked OK, I realised that the part beneath the stainless steel connection to the post was completely rotten and would undoubtedly have broken with only moderate force. We were in a rush at the time preparing to set off on our retirement cruise, so I took the old one to a timber yard at Stellendam, who made me a solid one for €50.
 
Do it yourself

It is a pleasant and low tech job to make a laminated tiller. I made mine in 1985, it was the first that I had attempted, and it is still going strong, so I am sure you can do it.
First you need a pattern, and you have the old tiller, so that step is already done.
To make the tiller, get a base of plywood/ chipboard/ whatever, large enough to lay the old tiller on.
Buy the timber for the tiller, in strips 6-8mm thick. Mine came from Robbins of Bristol.
I sanded it to to remove the marks of the plane. I used ash, as my desired shape was quite curved, and ash is a supple wood; others like the contrast between a light and a dark wood.
Get about 5 or 6 square blocks of scrap timber and drill 2 or 3 pilot holes for large woodscrews through them.
Lay the old tiller on the base, space the blocks evenly along the tiller, touching it, and mark their positions by drilling through the pilot holes.
Turn the base over, and woodscrew through the base to fix the blocks to the base on the other side.
Acquire a G clamp for each block. You will only need them for one day, so it should be possible to borrow or hire them, but if you can see them being useful in the future, why not buy them?
Butter the strips with your chosen glue. I used resorcinol, but these days I would probably use epoxy, with is a better gap filler, and needs less clamping.
Place the strips against the blocks, and clamp them in the shape of the old tiller. The more clamps the better, in the spaces between the blocks, if they are available. Use pieces of plastic to prevent the surplus glue, which will be forced out, from sticking the tiller to the base or the blocks.
Next day, remove the clamps, and plane the tiller to the required taper, and make it round.

I have a strange feeling that I am talking like a visitor from another age, the age when PBO carried articles about converting car engines to power your latest lifeboat conversion project. Clearly it is far easier to take a wodge of cash to someone who will do it for you, and if this is the consensus, then I apologize for wasting everyones time.
 
If you want to make a tiller and find the laminating thing too daunting/messy, consider a solid tiller (especially if it's not too strongly curved).

I bought a boat a few years ago, and during the rather boisterous delivery trip from Falmouth to Plymouth fell into the cockit and onto the tiller. The laminated tiller, obviously quite a few years old, split apart along the laminations. Fortunately it was intact enough to get me into port (Fowey), and the boat had a stumpy 'emergency tiller' I used for a while.

I took home the old laminated tiller. I know little about woodwork, but decided to try a solid tiller to avoid the complications (as I saw it) of laminating. (Glue never seems to work for me, unless I drip it someplace it shouldn't be!) Nice chap at Robbins of Bristol recommended ash or oak, and sold me a nice piece of one of those (can't remember which, but it had a nice pink-ish tinge - American Oak, perhaps?). I bought myself a spoke shave and had a very therapuetic time reproducing the double curvature and taper of the original laminated tiller. The finished varnished thing was a joy to behold.

Sadly I then discovered that the previous one must have been an off the peg (or off another boat) tiller, as the height/shape I'd carefully copied was a bit less than ideal for my cockpit! (Had i been a bit more familiar with the boat before the tiller broke I would have noticed that.)

None the less, it looked great, and was a little bit of me in the boat. Definitely worth the effort, and though the boat and its tiller have long moved on to new owners's l still have the spoke shave, and one day another 'slightly challenging but not too daunting' curved wood task will present itself and I'll get it out again.
 
Bending timber to shape?

Couple of interesting points arise from the above threads. First off, I think if the wood is still fairly sound, it is reasonabe to pry the laminates apart, clean out the mating faces then reglue. I've did this about two years ago and it seems to be holding up fine. After all, if the timbers are bent into shape and held laterally at the rudder stock, any stresses are sideways and not likely to shear the laminations. Mine had only parted after the Missus stumbled and fell onto the tiller, ie a downward force, which split some of the laminations.
Second point, I like the idea of making one, as Jeanne suggests, but would it not be better, if not essential, to steam the timbers first and leave them to cool into shape? Otherwise, would there not always be a tendency for the timber to try to staighten out, potentially pulling itself apart?
 
Humblebee said:
would it not be better, if not essential, to steam the timbers first and leave them to cool into shape? Otherwise, would there not always be a tendency for the timber to try to staighten out, potentially pulling itself apart?
Click to expand...
Not always necessary. It depends on the thickness of the laminate, the species to some extent, the glue used and the clamping arrangements.
I would make a tiller with 6 to 10mm thick laminates, from teak, English oak, Douglas fir or possibly clear spruce. I would avoid ash (not durable), mahogany (not very durable and prone to brittleness) and only use iroko if teak wasn't available and was of good quality. I would always use epoxy resin as it is the only bonding material that can be regarded as 'structural' (ie it has good tensile and shear strength).
Steaming is especially useful for teak and iroko, but is really only necessary if the clamping up procedure is going to be difficult or impossible without. The steamed laminates should be allowed to dry back to a reasonable mc (back to around 15-18%) before glueing, and that will take a few days. There shouldn't be too much spring-back with an epoxy lamination when the clamps are released, maybe a few mm on something like a tiller, and that can be allowed for when building the former.
Finally, avoid mixing the woods to give a striped effect. Purely on the grounds of good taste - it's a boat, not a hyena.
 
Based on advice from experts in canoe building, where they steam laminated stems, steaming is a great help. The strips will still tend to spring after they've cooled but the residual force in making up the laminate on the former is more manageable.

I agree about PBO telling us how to spend money rather than build or fix things nowadays, but due to illness, I bought a tiller from Tony Mckillican and can recomend his workmanship. He remembered my plea to make the handgrip smaller diameter than usual to accomodate my pudgy paws!

Rob.
 
I have just repaired mine. I had the same problem that everyone talks about - different types of wood, forced into shape with still a considerable spring in the laminates, etc

I striped the lower laminate off with knives, wire and heat,

I then separated the remaining laminates as much as I dared. I cleaned the old glue out with the use of a knife where I could and then sand papered between the two by squeezing the laminated together whilst drawing the paper along the joint - that worked quite well but don't over do it.

Next I used a polyurethane glue between the laminates - I used a painting spatula for this to ensure even coverage but it still a very messy job. I clamped this to a rough former to keep the correct shape and then screwed the laminates together ( whilst clamping at the same time) to stop them moving in the future.Finally I glued the lower laminate back on the hide the screws.

This time I opened up the holes at the base of the tiller that holds the bracket that fixes the tiler to the ruddder to much larger than required so I could seal them internally - this was the cause of the delamination - water was running down the tiller, in between the tiller and the brackets and into the holes and then in to the laminates.

As a last note, why do they use different woods with different coefficients of expansion and then expect a "hard" wood glue with little sheer strength to hold them together? For this same reason I would not use epoxy to glue them together.

Good luck
 
When I bought my boat in 2000, the (was!) laminated tiller (light and dark wood) was held together with gaffer tape and had some interesting 'rot' as well.

However, I delaminated it properly, cleaned it out and then inserted strips of new wood where appropriate, glued it all up with Cascophen (still available?) and clamped it for a day or two.

Sanded and varnished it is still a thing of beauty. We take it indoors each winter and keep it varnished, so it feels warm and smooth to our hands.

As for strength, I have no doubts at all as to its quality. I guess it depends on what state the wood is in - if good wood is re-glued properly it should be fine. If it is rotten wood, then nothing is going to fix it.
 
Here's a picture of my tiller during and after repair. It is all mahogany so differential expansion is no problem. Also the laminations are vertical. Getting it apart without breaking the laminations was the trickiest part of the job.

Like the poster's above, the glue had started to fail near the two bolts that hold the bracket that connects the autopilot and windvane. It's important that these holes are sealed properly. When I re-assembled it I drilled the bolt holes oversize, filled the holes with epoxy and re-drilled; so the bolts are now mounted in epoxy sleeves instead of touching the timber.

(Yes I know - the excess thread needs cutting off the bolts! I'll get round to it)
 
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does it have to be wood?

Wood is not the only material out there. Although I guess aesthetically it depends on personal taste and style of boat. See the attached photo of my daddys little contessa 25 we used to race about in when I was a kid.

When the second wooden tiller snapped he got a local engineer to weld up the one you see in the picture. Its all 316 stainless and is lighter than the old wooden one. the winged handle design and pin for the autohelm were all built in and it was just welded on to the stainless fitting that clamped on the tiller stock. It worked a treat. he even wrapped that tennis raquet handle stuff on it to stop it from freezing hands.

Sadly the boat is rarely used these days but the tiller is still A1 as the rest of the boat rots away on its mooring.

Think it only cost about 100 quid in the mid 90's. thats the way I'll go when the one on my boat snaps (imminent) its delaminated fairly badly.

sorry about my then girlfriend poking her tongue out BTW. I made an honest women of her in the end.;)
 
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