Boat steering mechanism

Hey,

I was wondering HOW does the reversed steering mechanism work?
As I know that sailing ships in the 1700's when they turned the wheel right they turned left and vice versa, but today you turn the wheel right and you turn right and vice versa.

How does the latter work?



Thanks

 

It is in the linkage or pulleys. Depending on how you hook them up, they turn one way or the other.

 

Or sometimes hydraulics. Just reverse the cylinder and voila!

 

It's very simple to reverse the steering with any system, but the purpose eludes me.

I once took the rack and pinion unit apart and accidentally assembled it with the rack below the pinion instead of above it. The effect was hilarious: I hit every object I tried to avoid!

 

I agree
you havnt lived till you have driven a boat with reversed steering..or tried to

 

That would be a new one for me to. I do understand how it could turn out that.

 

Humans are conditioned so well it is a real mind bender to drive.

 

Remembering that the helms man on the titanic was trained in a tiller style ship and threw the wheel the wrong way leaving not enough time to miss the iceberg.

 

It's easy to change the action direction. If you push, then to change the direction of the action you pull instead. Have a look at how an outboard push pull steering works. They all pull on the one side, to change the direction you will have to push - or have the cable enter the other way through the motor mounting to change direction.

 

Reversed helm operation isn't difficult to get used to and small boat sailors have no issue at all with it. Flipping a quadrant, rudder stock or head arm or whatever, can accomplish this very easily, though the question of why has been raised.

I was rebuilding a VW transaxle years ago, when I was still willing to crawl under something and turn wrenches. I placed the ring gear on the wrong side of the case, but everything bolted up perfectly, so I reinstalled the transaxle. I quickly learned that I now had 4 gears in reverse and one, rather tall gear in forward. I drove it around for about a month like this, through the local developments to the store, etc. until I yanked the damn thing back out of there and flipped the ring gear to the side it belonged. I became very good and driving the VW bus in reverse at 35 to 40 MPH and now credit this with my expert backing skills.

 

LOL Par, probably a good thing you stayed with boats eh

Kinky ! They mostly swear at me when I do that...

 

Nothing changed today, there is still no compulsory training to see if you can drive a ship before you get the wheel/command