Hi Iain,

Great to see a Fortune 30 with junk rig! I admired the design in BC.

Your cockpit is constrained between the aft cabin and main companionway. A whipstaff and short tiller can give mechanical advantage, but the more of that, the less the rudder moves. Your wheel (rotary whipstaff) is exactly the same, except that it can go right around, giving big rudder deflection while keeping your arms in shape. (Light weight, many reps.) I think you'd be frustrated with a whipstaff.

What if you carried the rudder stock upwards, clear of the aft cabintop? Besides making the aft cabin inaccessible, would there be room for a tiller extending either forward or aft? Or sideways? What provision is made for an emergency tiller? What if you controlled the rudder not by its stock but by its blade, or???

I'm sketching wild here... but a few (no, many) wild sketches eventually worked on mehitabel.

I considered: a universal joint to allow a bend in the rudder stock and a tiller in a new position; a whipstaff; keeping the wheel, but no thanks; building an outboard rudder; building tandem rudders; a pair of sideways tillers, athwartships that is; and in one sketch, a big horizontal wheel...

In conclusion, mehitabel's tiller simply extends aft, and sweeps a wide clear space. But her rudder is balanced, so with 4 feet of tiller, hand force is very light. I think your rudder is keel-hung and unbalanced. In all, it seems that Huntingford's/Fortune's low-geared wheel idea, in that nice cozy cockpit, may be well-justified. But a tiller is so nice. Sketch away!

Cheers, Kurt

Iain Grigor wrote:

I want to try a tiller on my boat, in place of the low-geared wheel.  The tiller can only be 32 inches in length.  It is possible that that would be a heavy helm.  But I could fit a whipstaff to the end of the tiller.  Would that add mechanical advantage? How high would the top of the staff have to be above the end of the tiller to get a worthwhile mechanical advantage (if any at all).

32 inches is quite short for a tiller on a boat the size of yours, but I guess the big question is just how light/heavy the steering is, and that will determine how successful the short tiller would be. Putting a whipstaff on the end of the tiller seems to be getting a bit complicated. How about just a whipstaff which would operate through a block and tackle system onto a quadrant or short tiller on the rudder shaft/stock. A friend of mine has a high performance 10 metre catamaran which is steered with a whipstaff in the middle of the boat and via non stretch line and high performance blocks to each rudder. He seems quite happy with the system.

A thing to consider with the whipstaff on the end of the tiller is that when tacking or making a large turn the handle end of the tiller has to swing through a very wide arc, so it might be difficult to make that happen with the whipstaff controlling the tiller.

No doubt you will have wiser and more experienced people than me responding to this question. Good luck with it!