Skeg hung rudder

[kingfish]

Hello all,
I am thinking about modifieing my fin keel on my catalina 30 during haulout, by adding a skeg for the rudder. Have any of you done this or have and good advise to send my way?
cheers

D

[Jeff H]

Before I answer your question, I have to ask, why the heck would you want to add a skeg?

It is a huge and difficult job to do right. I designed a modification to a ketch that had serious steering problems in which moved the rudder and added a skeg. It is not easy to get adequate support for the skeg on a boat that was not originallyconstructed with a skeg. On the boat that I worked on we made a glass off of the boat. In order to get proper strength we molded the skeg with an extension leg that extended through the bottom of the boat to the underside of the deck and then added a bulkhead on either side that was glassed in on all sides to the deck, topsides and hull bottom. We also added a knee that went roughly 20 inched forward of skeg leg. We then glassed the skeg to the hull with a large diameter fillet that gave us a lot of contact area. we were dealing with a hull that was roughly an inch thick which allowed use to taper the connection deep into the hull laminate.

In our case we were adding an outboard rudder so we did not have a problem with an inboard rudder tube or designing gugdeons and pindles to work with the rudder post.

In other words, you had better have a really good reason to want to add a skeg on a Catalina because otherwise you would be way far ahead just buying a boat that already has a skeg hung rudder.

Jeff

[Talbot]

I had planned to change my skeg and transom hung rudders to add sugar scoops and rudder tubes with underhung rudders. When I had finished costing it, I recognised that for this money I could buy a better boat that already had these, I would not risk that my mods were wrong, and would not see a drop in re-sale value, - boat buyers are frequently suspicious of heavily modified boats.

[GordMay]

An excellent article:
“Keel & Rudder Design” ~ by David Vacanti
Goto: Professional BoatBuilder Magazine
http://www.proboat-digital.com/proboat/200506/
Click on pages: 76, 78, 80, 82, 84 thru’ 97