Thread: Show your helm!
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Old 11-26-2014, 09:33 PM   #105
Marin
Scraping Paint
 
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Join Date: Oct 2007
Posts: 13,745
Quote:
Originally Posted by Wayfarer View Post
I've noticed on several boats, especially Grand Banks, there's a brass or metal tube that runs from the middle of the lower helm up to the overhead. What is that??.
As others have stated, it carries the steering cable for the upper helm. Most Grand Banks boats have cable-chain steering. For the upper helm, a stainless cable wound around the lower helm's shaft runs up the tube (cable chase), takes several turns around the upper helm's shaft, and then runs back down the chase to the lower helm shaft. There is tension on the cable, so turning one wheel turns the other.

Very early Grand Banks--- mid 1960s--- used a rod that ran up the chase. My understanding is that, a bit like the driveshaft on a vehicle, this rod connected a simple gearbox on the lower helm's shaft to a similar gearbox on the upper helm. Judging from occasional posts on the Grand Banks owners forum, this system has some drawbacks. Fairly soon after American Marine began producing their Grand Banks line, they dropped the shaft in favor of the cable system.

In our experience, the cable chase does not interfere with the sight picture from the helm at all. Starting from the first time we took our boat out, we simply don't see it. From where we stand or sit at the helm, the cable chase is somewhat lined up with the mullion between the starboard and center windows, so the chase simply "disappears." We've never found ourselves wishing it wasn't there, and friends we've had drive the boat took no notice of it either, even though none of them had ever steered a GB before.

We do not sit or stand rigid at the helm; we're always moving a bit so things like the pulpit rail, handrail and stanchions, cable chase, and window mullions are never static. So we have never had a problem seeing whatever is on the water in front of us.

An advantage we've taken of the cable chase is to use it as a bulletin board. If we want to remind ourselves to do something the next time we're up at the boat, we put a sticky note on the chase: put new snap on such and such a cover, top off battery water, and so forth.

We color coded our all-chain anchor rode when we bought it but the paint soon wore off and neither of us could remember the code anyway. So taking a cue from somebody experienced over on the GB forum, I simply put a plastic cable tie on the chain every ten feet leaving the tails untrimmed. You want 180 feet of rode out, count off eighteen ties as the chain's going out. You can even do it without looking at the chain or in the dark simply by resting a finger on top of the chain as it's running out to the end of the pulpit. But to make sure we remember how much is out, we put a sticky note on the cable chase with the footage count.
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