Home Made Tiller Tamer for 15 Bucks!

[Jeff Asbury]

Hey Fellow Sailors & Friends,

Check this out. Rather than spending over a $100. bucks for a Forspar tiller extension and lock, I came up with this solution for about $15. bucks. There was already a bronze oar lock mounted on the side of the cockpit when I purchased my 1973 Ericson 27. I never knew what it was for so I applied it to my solution for a Tiller Tamer. I bought a Paint Roller Extension, Roller Handel and a U Bolt with two wing nuts. I put a piece of plastic tubing over the U Bolt to protect the tiller. I drilled two holes in the Roller Handel for the U bolt and one in the end of the Roller Extension. Enough explanation. Check out the photos. This will hold my tiller on corse for quite a while.

Jeff

 

[ignacio]

How did this work out?

Hi Jeff,

How did this work out? Still using this solution, or have you replaced with something else?

Hey Fellow Sailors & Friends,

Check this out. Rather than spending over a $100. bucks for a Forspar tiller extension and lock, I came up with this solution for about $15. bucks. There was already a bronze oar lock mounted on the side of the cockpit when I purchased my 1973 Ericson 27. I never knew what it was for so I applied it to my solution for a Tiller Tamer. I bought a Paint Roller Extension, Roller Handel and a U Bolt with two wing nuts. I put a piece of plastic tubing over the U Bolt to protect the tiller. I drilled two holes in the Roller Handel for the U bolt and one in the end of the Roller Extension. Enough explanation. Check out the photos. This will hold my tiller on corse for quite a while.

Jeff

 

[HughHarv]

Hey Fellow Sailors & Friends,

my solution for a Tiller Tamer.

Very cool, I could have used that I my Santana 20 instead of the tiller tamer with line!

 

[Glyn Judson]

Po' man's tiller tamer.

Jeff, Great solution for your tiller, clearly the result of imaginative thinking on your part. I'm reminded of the days when looking for a similar fix on our boat, but mine wasn't nearly as clever as yours and I was near broke back then anyway. I secured one end of a short length of light line to a cleat on the coaming adjacent to the end of the centered tiller, took a number of wraps, maybe five or six around the tiller with the same line that I then cleated on the other coaming. The result was a somewhat taught line spanning the cockpit that allowed me to micro-adjust the tiller by closing my hand around the wrap and rotating it one way or the other. I'd like to think that I came up with that idea but alas, I'm sure thousands of sailors beat me to it hundreds of years earlier. But it was still pretty cool and worked as I hoped it would. Glyn Judson, E31 hull #55, Marina del Rey, CA

 

[Jeff Asbury]

Thanks Glyn & Harvey,

Poor Man is right!

Man that's a old post. No I no longer use that set up. I think about a year or two later I purchased a Simrad TP22 Tiller Pilot. That tiller tamer rig I came up with worked pretty good if I got the right reach. I think I have that thing still in the garage. It really helped me out because I single hand so much. It could hold Her into the wind long enough to get my main up.

It's interesting that this old post came up because I recently purchased a used whisker pole. I was surfing the web to see how much money I saved by buying this used Forspar pole and I ran across a site where some one fashioned a paint roller extension into a whisker pole. Check this out, it's pretty clever: http://www.lazyka.com/LazyKa/content/mods/Mod_WhiskerPole.htm



Simrad TP22 Tiller Pilot.
http://www.defender.com/product.jsp?path=-1|344|302025|296563|321072|1018466&id=336601