YS Steering Pedestal replacement or refurbish

[Nick J]

I recently replaced the old Raymarine ST-40 instruments with B&G Triton 2 at the helm. This involved removing the Yacht Specialties pedestal guard which required removing everything on the pedestal above sprocket. What I found wasn’t promising. The steering shaft has play that seems to be coming from where the bearing’s seat, there’s some corrosion where the steel bolts attach the guard plate, engine controls, and compass, and the base of the pedestal is crumbling in places. There’s a lot of discussion on the forum about refurbishing the Yacht Specialties pedestal, but I’m wondering if it would be more cost effective to replace the pedestal with an Edson. The advantage would be moving to a pedestal with readily available parts.

I initially thought the Jefa rack and pinion system would be a simpler solution, but PYI quoted $6,200. Edson cable pedestals seem to be more reasonably priced. Has anyone done this swap? What was involved? Could you reuse the YS idler pully assembly? Did you relocate the pedestal guard feet or make a plate to adapt the YS spacing to the Edson pedestal?

 

[Loren Beach]

I recall that at least one participant here has had a new column and base machined (and anodized and painted) to replace the OEM Yacht Specialties one. As long as the top casting is OK, it might be fine to re-weld it to a new column. Perhaps. It depends on the Cost of the Edson unit; and starting over with all new parts certainly does have some attraction!
While you have the old column base and presumably the two guard "feet" out, be sure to overdrill-epoxy-redrill all those holes in the plywood coring.

 

[Nick J]

There's no such thing as too many reminders to overdrill, fill, and drill. That was the first thing I did after pulling it apart. I was happy to find dry plywood even though it made it more difficult to remove the core. So far, so good removing hardware on this boat!

 

[Christian Williams]

As I recall, Edson is used to YS/Merriman compatibility questions so worth a call to them. There's very little compatibility.

Here's my base replacement story. Flat base works fine--just make clear to the machine shop that it needs to be strong.

E32-3 - Pedestal Rebuild

Photo guide to step-by-step disassembly of pedestal steering: http://www.ericsonyachts.org/infoexchange/showthread.php?14133-Yacht-Specialties-Pedestal-Disassembly-with-Photos This took longer than expected, often felt like the...

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