Tiller Towards Trouble
The boat came with a cracked tiller. There was also a bunch of serious wear on the underside where it presumable rubbed on the cockpit side tanks. To fix it up, I sourced carbon sleeve from Soller Composites. This stuff is really strong and handy, working generally like a Chinese finger trap.
I made a big mistake on my first go based on some advice online. My method involved wetting a couple layers of sock with epoxy before applying an aggressive heat shrink tubing to crush it altogether. Getting a bad feeling that the tubing wasn't compressing in any meaningful way on the somewhat square tiller cross section, I put the whole lot in an envelope bag to cover my bases. As it turned out, the result was a mess, as things went from bad to worse. The vacuum didn't overcome the stiff heat shrink, and the whole laminate was full of voids and resin pooling. I learned a valuable and somehow obvious lesson to stay away from heat shrink. There might be a good moment for it with a truly round section, but the jury is out on that.
De-bagging the next day was followed by swearing, and a bunch of grinding to remove the failed repair. For the next round, I just went old school. I wet out the sock layers, milked them down with my disposable gloves and set it in the vice to dry, no bag, no heat shrink, no nothing. Sometimes it's best to keep things simple.
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