Thanks to a bi-coastal collaboration, Moore Brothers builds out new rudder and components that are ready for the Transpac race
Rudders are a big part of our business and when a rudder for an Alan Andrews ‘49 came across our desk, we were excited for the opportunity.
How it came about
The project manager for the Andrews ‘49, Randy Moreno, reached out to Moore Brothers’ Senior Engineer Gunnar Salkind, who had worked with Moreno in the past. He wanted to build a rudder that would be light, effective, and able to cut through the prevalent Sargassum seaweed that clogs the Pacific ocean in certain areas, particularly on the Transpac route. Mark Raymond, a manufacturing engineer at Moore Brothers, was also part of the build.
“Alan Andrews–who is a West Coast designer–he's been around for a long time. He has designed a lot of really successful race boats on the West Coast. It was his design. It's an older boat, and we didn't build the original rudder, but they were looking for a replacement rudder,” said Raymond. “Jeff [Kent] and I built a lot of posts for Allen already and worked with him in the past,” he continued.
The challenge of this rudder was that–like many rudders built for West coast racing– it needed to have a knife in the front of the blade to cut seaweed. “I'd say 90% of the rudders we do for out there end up with a complex weed knife system, and it makes the rudder a lot more challenging to build, but we've done quite a few of them,” said Raymond. “And because Randy Moreno has built so many of those systems himself, it was a good opportunity to kind of collaborate using our knowledge of the weed knife systems that we built and then incorporating some of his ideas into it because he's the one that ultimately had to use it.”
Raymond explained that one of the main things about making a successful rudder with the ability to cut seaweed is that when the boat is sailing and the knife is all the way down, it stows itself away at the bottom of the rudder blade, but there's an open slot on the front of the rudder as you're sailing so water will go in and up the tube that the rod for the knife rides in and ultimately would just spray out the top if it has not been sealed. “It would just spray out the top like a fire hose if you were sailing around, which, of course, you wouldn't want,” he explained. “So one of the things that's always a challenge is how to make that a closed watertight system at the top.”
According to Raymond, Moreno had an idea to make it simpler. “We sort of took his idea and made it even one step simpler than his. So in that way, it was great,” he said. “That's when the collaboration really is helpful. That was one of the things that I've enjoyed about this one.”
But it wasn’t all easy
The other thing that Raymond had to do was heavily modify the quadrants. “They had a steering quadrant on the old rudder, and they didn't want to make a new quadrant. So I had to take their old quadrant and make it fit on the new rudder post, which was much bigger,” Raymond explained.
“The mounting position had to be in exactly the same place on the new rudder, but the post is a lot bigger. So I had to cut the hub completely out of their carbon quadrant and make a whole design, a whole new hub, and glue it into the quadrant and the same exact center and put it all back together again,” Raymond said. “And then he [Moreno] had to take that quadrant that now fits the new rudder and he had to put the same shape onto the old rudder so that he can also use it on the old rudder. It's very complicated.”
“Randy has been around for a long time. He's built these systems. He's extremely handy. And he's told us from the very beginning….’you guys get it 95 to 98% to the finish line. I'll do the rest, and if there's any tweaks, I'll just tweak it,’” Raymond explained.
The rudder was finished and sent out to California in January, where Moreno quickly got to work; “I wanted to be able to see exactly how it was put together by Moore Brothers before I finished it. I was very happy with the progress that they made,” he said.
“The only altercations we had to deal with were in the quadrant setup.” Moreno explained, and that was mostly because he had flown out with the quadrant to Bristol at one point, where the team fitted it on the new post. “We knew it wasn't going to fit, and we had to make a new back wedge,” he said. Moreno then had to fly back to California with the quadrant before the Moore Brothers team had finished doing everything. “And that was because I needed it to drive the boat to the yard to be able to haul the boat out,” he said with a laugh. “Mark did the best he could and then we just had to change the shape of the back end of the post a little bit, but it was nothing I was not expecting to have to do.”
A few other pieces
Before the rudder was sent out to California, a few additional pieces were made for the boat and shipped out with the rudder, including a J0 strut, built by Salkind.
“The strut basically allows you to sheet your big lightweight J0 to leeward of your boat– outboard of the boat itself,” Salkind explained, which allows you to have more control over the sail shape.
“The boats in California are allowed to make these struts and sheet them outboard and then put, either a jib underneath them or two jibs underneath them. Some of them sail with a triple head rig or a double head rig,” he explained. “A lot of compression is put in that strut. So it has to be very stiff and strong to do the job that is being asked to do.” Which is why they made it out of standard modulus carbon fiber. The team also made a custom piece that fits into the mast, and Salkind specified an additional laminate for the bowsprit on It’s OK, bringing the stiffness up to race ready.
According to Moreno, the rudder is now in the boat and steers really nicely. “I was very pleased overall with the entire process,” he said.
Moreno said working with Mark and Peter Wisotzkey–Moore Brothers’ operation manager–was great, as was working with Salkind on the other additional pieces. “I've known Gunnar for a long time, and he does absolutely great work.”
