Elan 333 rudder failures

[RobbieW]

IIRC Nevil Shute also wrote in the front of one of his books "An Engineer is a person that can do what any other idiot can do but in half the time and at half the cost".

It was reading "Trustee from the Toolroom" as a 14yr old trainee for a Borstal residence in an inner London council estate that made me consider that there might be wider horizons and it would be nice to own a sailing boat. The book never mentioned the marina costs!!

Another Shute quote "an engineer is a man who can do for five shillings what any fool can do for a pound" from Slide Rule (according to Wiki)

To bring the thread back from its drift, I have friends who had a 333 which needed a rudder repair but as they are away till end Feb I cant refresh my memory of the circumstances - by the time I can the thread will have long gone past its half life

 

[andymcp]

As an aside, I passed a shallow draft version of the Elan on the hardstanding last weekend and was a bit surprised to see that the rudder was about a foot deeper than the keel (presumably the shallow and deep draft versions share the same rudder design).

This seemed a far from ideal arrangement.

I would imagine that the boat you saw must have either a non-standard keel or rudder then. I owned a shallow draft Elan 333, and the keel was still deeper than the rudder (the rudder being the same as on the deep keel version).

 

[Lucky Duck]

I have just had a quick look on google images, most likely the rudder is non-standard as it looks deeper and narrower than shown in drawings/photos.