After its trip around the pond I had a few little jobs to finish on the Puffer. One was that the steering was moving on its tiller. Not much but it’s not something you want. I tried glueing it but that wouldn’t hold forever. A mechanical solution was required.
In theory this is simple. Drill a hole through the “tiller” (sorry I can’t remember the proper term, it’s the bit the servo is pushing on the rudder shaft) and the shaft. Insert a bit of brass wire and the two will be inexorably fixed.
Of course real life isn’t so simple. Drill off centre and you miss the shaft, probably weakening the tiller at the same time. The shaft is steel and the tiller whitemetal so if the drill skids on the shaft you’ll chew up the softer metal and ruin the part.
I started the hole with a pin vice but wasn’t making headway into the steel so I replaced my hand with an electric screwdriver and hoped. The whole arrangement, drill it, pin vice, chuck & drill was longer than desirable but amazingly it seemed to work.
A little bit of brass wire fixed in with superglue finished the job. Had I made sure the tiller and rudder were perpendicular and not a few degrees off then the job would have been perfect, but then you can’t remember everything.
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