help, steering issues

[confusednewbie]

Hello everyone, thank you for letting us join your club.
We have just bought a fjord 24 weekender, we love the boat, but we need advice.
What we have is a TAMD-41 Volvo inboard diesel with a 270 outdrive leg and hynautic hydraulic steering, and it wont stay in a straight line on the river. We've played around with the trim tabs, and the tilt and trim on the ouutdrive leg, but to no effect. We have bled the steering and purged the air in the system, which has improved the handling slightly. But it still wanders from side to side.
Any advice would be much appreciated.

[Lars Lundbladh]

Hi

Is the outdrive leg moving? or is the behavior of the bout itself that is the problem?
Sharp V bottom hulls have a problem going straight in low speed there is not much you can do about this, try to trim down the bow of the boat this helps a little.
270 outdrives are not usually equipped with hydraulic steering so my question is what brand are mounted send a picture by mail to med at lars.lundbladh@fjordclub.com

/Lars

[confusednewbie]

Hi,
Thanks for the response, we are really struggling with trying to hold this boat in a straight line. We will take a picture tomorrow of the hydraulic setup, and send it to you.
Would switching out the hydraulic steering for teleflex steering help at all?
Once again, thanks for the response

[Lars Lundbladh]

Hydraulic steering is always better than wire steering. It if it’s broken leaking cylinder or pump then it’s not good.
If you steer fully in one direction do you feel a resistance?

[confusednewbie]

Firstly, apologies for not sending the photo of the steering, but the weather has not been on our side for the past couple of days, so we will send a photo as soon as it stops raining.
Secondly, do you think switching to twin outboard engines would be possible and/or help? A marine engineer said our only option was twin engines if we wanted to keep it, but twin inboards is a bit too much work for us, and a bit out of our range of price at the moment. Or is the boat incompatible with outboard engines as a primary form of propulsion?

[Makro]

A Weekender 24 works fine with one inboard engine, somethings wrong or worn out here
If you grab the outboard drive, and another one holding the steering wheel, can you move the leg from side to side?

When you say you can't hold a straight line, is it at any speed?

[confusednewbie]

When i say we can't hold a straight line, i mean at the speed limit of the river thames (8 knots) - or in our case, due to wash, 5 knots.
from a stationary position, we have about four inches of the wheel turning before the hydraulic piston moves and another four before the outdrive leg turns.

[Makro]

Ok, got it!
A planing hull with single outboard have a tendency to move/ ”steer” from side to side in slow speed and if any part of the steering has a play it makes it even worse.
Have you try to trim down the trim tabs on both sides like Lars suggested?

[confusednewbie]

we have tried to put down the trim tabs on both sides, but it has not appeared to make any difference

[Makro]

Ok, but four inch turning the wheel before the piston moves is too much anyway.
Have you tried to bleed the hydraulic system?

[confusednewbie]

Hi thanks for the response,
We have checked the entire pipe system and there doesn't appear to be any bleed nipples anywhere. However, coming off of the back of the ram there appears to be two tails that reduce down to about 6 millimetres, and I am assuming that i would need to put a pipe on the end and place said pipe into a vat of hydraulic fluid, to prevent backflow on the air, however, we haven't been able to do this yet, because we need to order the hydraulic fluid.
If this doesn't work, we are planning to switch to teleflex steering.

[Makro]

Give the hydraulic a chance and try to fix it.