Coming Together

I’ve learned that the best way to deal with my weather induced depression is to crack on with something productive that will pay dividends when the sunshine returns.

To that end today I’ve been hiding in the pod away from the cold wind and hailstorms finishing up the last bits of metalwork on Lewis the self-steering gear. I’ve now pretty much finished putting together the vane attachment assembly which you can see in the photos below. It’s been a bit of an act of faith making all the various small parts without really understanding where they fitted or what their purpose was but now I’m beginning to see the light.

I don’t expect you’ll be able to figure out what you’re looking at yet but hopefully over the next few days you’ll see things coming together and making sense.

Jon asked about the differences between this Hebridean design and a conventional servo-pendulum system. I’m not sure I can really explain but as I see it the fact that the whole self-steering assembly swings on a single pivot point and that the wind vane itself doesn’t ‘feather’ until the pendulum swings are two stand out features. As for a video of it working you can see one HERE.