Rudder Box / Tiller

Now that I finally the gudgeons, I now have the final piece of the puzzle to finish off the rudder box: The width of the gudgeon support strips! I had some mahogany laying around the place that was close to the right size and not too far off the correct thickness. So after some quality time with the table saw and the thickness planer I was able to create these pieces.

I also took the time to build up the tiller. I decided to laminate a combination of cedar and poplar strips to keep in character with the rest of the boat. Somehow a laminated tiller is a lot prettier than just a solid cedar one.

I went though my spare stack of cutoff wood pieces and found a couple of appropriate cedar and poplar pieces. These too I ran through the table saw / thickness planer to get them to the right size. I left a little extra width on the pieces to allow me to clean things up on the thickness planer once everything was set up.

I epoxied both pieces together and let everything set up overnight. I then proceeded to finalize the tiller handles. After cleaning the edges up on the joiner to get rid of the extra epoxy I shaped the ends to match the rudder box and then ran it through an 1/8 round router bit on the router table to soften the edges.

Once complete I epoxied the whole mess together and voila! A finished piece! Amazingly enough this is really that last piece of construction that was left on the boat!

Once everything has set up it will be time to sand, epoxy and varnish!

My next project is to finish the top mast!