Repairing the Tiller

There is one thing true of all vehicles, you need to be able to turn. In a car this is the steering wheel, on your bicycle, the handle bars, on a small boat like Spark, it is the Tiller.

Spark's tiller was in decent shape, only a bit of "iron sickness" from where a couple of steel screws had rusted into the wood. No splits, no rot, and no warping was seen anywhere along it's length, making this a viable candidate for refinishing.

After sanding it down to smooth bare wood, I was forced to consider what to do about the mounting holes for the hardware that was attached to it. In an ideal situation, I would reuse it, but I like to tinker and make things better. To do this required me to drill the holes out with appropriate sized drill bits and install wooden dowels. With the dowels cemented into place with epoxy, they would be come an integral part of the tiller, strengthening it instead of weakening it.

 

Once the epoxy was dry, it was a matter of cutting the dowels tight to the wood and then sanding them flush.

While all this is fun, the real enjoyment comes from getting a good couple layers of clear varnish over the smooth wood. I still need to add another 4 or 6 layers, but it looks good so far with Interlux's Schooner Varnish 96