The Steamboating Forum

Fred, the trick to get these to display is take the s off of https and make it just http.

Some good video of a Kitchen Rudder in action on youtube, the video from minute 2:00 to 3:00 shows the device in water clear enough to see what is going on. Search on youtube: 11th Stirling Boat Rally 2014

The vessel, Santana that I mentioned back in January this year, is up for sale. You can find it on the ISS website at http://www.steamboating.org/ISS/ISSclassifieds.html. If you look at the pictures you can see the unit under the stern. The owner uses a hydraulic steering unit mounted on the engine near the steering station to control the "clamshell", and thus the speed/direction of the unit. This works very well and allows the engineer/helmsman to control the unit without having to "lock" things in any given position. Click on the "photo" hyperlink in the engine description (Gene Goebel has his hand on a small "steering wheel" mounted on the engine). Bart, I also have in amongst things the address of a gentlemen (can't remember if it's in Canada or Australia) who was willing to design a unit for steamboats at a very nominal cost. Let me know if you're interested further. You can contact Warren Caldwell through the ad. I'm sure he will be happy to help you with the Kitchen Rudder.

I will bluntly say, I have yet to read this thread top-to-bottom, however as there has been a few threads on my own forum about fitting such devices to narrowboats on the uk canals I thought I would share a link to one of the main threads on it, below.

We dont have on our boat to the complexity of retro-fitting one and because in my mind, they are not well suited to shallow canal, issues with debris, etc however what we do have is a shilling rudder, which was a very simple retro fit and I would say added around 20-30% extra lift. I wrote the wiki article on the Shilling Rudder at the time, and it contains as much information as I had to make ours...

http://www.canalworld.net/forums/index. ... opic=64337

The sites search engine is pretty good (google based) so fire 'Kitchen Rudder' into it for more threads.


Daniel

Dhutch wrote:...however what we do have is a shilling rudder, which was a very simple retro fit and I would say added around 20-30% extra lift. ...

Photos, for what its worth:

Seems you can only do three at a time....