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Fibreglass and Carbon repair – tillers

we can repair most things with our extensive workshop facilities, broken something, below are a couple of repairs we’ve undertaken, if you’ve got a problem, please give us a call to discuss.

Laser XD tiller

we were given this broken laser tiller to repair.

so we did,

we cleaned out the insides, created a carbon inner skin to replicate the shape and chamfered the original tiller, we then laid in a combination of UD and bi-axial cloth, wrapped it all with some plain weave carbon in a uv-resistant epoxy matrix and vacuumed it all down and baked it. Once this had set we gave it a couple of coats of UV lacquer to protect it even more for under half the price of a new one.

Winder Solo Tiller

we were presented with a rather sorry looking rudder and tiller where someone had tried a home repair by ramming a few pieces of broom handle inside it and epoxying it in, unfortunately the broom handle was a bit large (not to mention heavy) and had split the tubing almost to the rudder stock.

here you can see the break and part of the broom
and once we’d managed to pull it apart, unfortunately the wood had also been used to strengthen (??!) the end of the tiller to fit the tiller extension uj.and split it there too, only held together with some tape.
and here it is all disassembled

unfortunately there was only a couple of inches at the stock end that were salvageable, so we cut the back as far from the stock as we could, made an internal tube and glued the stub and a new tiller tube together.

here’s the graft of the new tiller
the tiller graft was then slightly chamfered and some plain weave carbon was roll wrapped over the repair in a UV stable epoxy resin matrix and then heat shrunk to fit.
as with all our tillers we also roll wrap plain weave carbon where any fittings will be attached, to save drilling all the way through the tiller and having bolts exposed to catch on your hands of sheets, we also build up the inside of the tiller where the uj will be fitted. We then drill and tap into this and secure the fastenings in epoxy.

and here’s the completed rudder and tiller, complete with new downhaul and a saddle under the uj, one more happy customer at a 3rd of the cost of a replacement stock.