What’s so important about a wheel brake? That’s what I wondered when we couldn’t get ours to work. Back in 2012 during the survey we noticed the wheel brake didn’t work. It’s basically just a twisty knob on the side of the steering pedestal that tightens a clamp around a shaft that stops the wheel from turning. It’s important because if you need to leave the helm while sailing or motoring it’s nice if the boat doesn’t veer out of control. Come to find out it’s also necessary if you want to use auxiliary steering like a wind vane.
Last Fourth of July we sailed over to Middle Slough for the night. Almost immediately after leaving the dock the steering wheel started making a little squeal. As the day went on the squeal became louder and louder and the wheel was feeling pretty sticky. As happens so frequently on boats, an easy little trip turns into more boat projects.
When we got back to the marina we took the whole steering pedestal apart and found why the wheel was squealing and why the brake hadn’t worked since we bought the boat. In the engine room directly beneath the steering pedestal we found bronze shavings on the floor. This indicated something was rubbing hard enough to wear the bronze down.
Once we got the pedestal apart we could see that the bronze wheel brake went from never exerting enough clamping force to actually brake the wheel no matter how much we tightened the knob, to being too tight to let the wheel shaft spin smoothly. We haven’t touched the wheel brake in years, so we have no idea why it suddenly decided to clamp down.
We took the bronze brake and the stainless steel shaft collar to a machine shop to have 3/32 removed from each piece. Rich installed some brake pad material to the inside of the bronze piece and a spring on the screw knob. It all seems to be working great and now we have a functioning wheel brake.
