Diagnosing and fixing stiff boat steering

hey there dang asked you here today we're going to continue the theme steering and have a look at the steering on this Honda and figure out why it's a bit stiff the way I approach this problem is to isolate the parts of the steering and that way I can test them all individually and really quickly narrow down where the stiffness is coming from the way I'm going to do that is take this 14 mil nut off the end of the drag link and then separate the drag link from the steering rod here now the steering on this boat is stiff but it's not immovable so it's not a sea steering but it is just quite tight to turn particularly when it first starts the other reason I went up to the helm then wasn't just to show you what it's like now it's also because if you move the steering further this way quite often it's easier to pull this drag link out now that drag link is disconnected we can see how hard it is turn the motor and the answer is not at all if it was really hard I'll show you what the problem is there are nylon bushings in here and then there are grease nipples on the side that push grease between the bushing and this outer casing of the steering bracket on the mounting bracket if that gets filled with old grease it'll get resistance if corrosion starts to build up in here it'll actually pinch on those bearings it'll compress them and they'll get really stiff so if you disconnect is doing and this motor is hard to turn the stiffness is coming from corrosion or old grease inside this tube here I've got a video on how to fix that problem it's not a particularly simple fix unfortunately now that video is on a quite a small motor a little maybe eight help horsepower or something but the principle is almost identical for all our boards our boards are pretty much the same they just bigger there are a few shortcuts to trying to fix that problem one of them is to try and put a bit of heat on that tube to try and melt old grease obviously that's going to have no effect on corrosion but if somebody heats that tube somebody else turns the wheel left and right while somebody else pumps grease with a grease gun it can make a difference that procedure may not work all the time but I do think it's worth trying before you disassemble the whole outboard if it does work great if it doesn't you're going to step up to the next procedure which involves dismantling now I'm going to go back up to the helm turn the wheel again and see what it feels like now this steering actually feels pretty smooth once the steering rods out of the tilt tube quite a bit so I don't think it's a real problem with helm and I don't think it's a problem with the length of the cable I either the cable running through the casing down to the stern of the boat if that was full of corrosion I think it'd be quite difficult all the time what I'm going to do now is undo the collar on the steering cable at the outboard end and we'll pull that steering rod through and have a look at that I normally use a shifter on these the collar on these steering cables but this shift has actually got graduation it looks like it's saying it's a 28 millimeter you can hopefully see here this has got a bit of white corrosion on it and if I go to undo it this is turning as well here what I'm going to do is spray this try and dissolve with this corrosion and then get a second spanner that I can put on here so I can break them independently of each other this is actually just a bit of kerosene only because I've realized we've run out of wd-40 and this span is a thirty two mil if I hold this nut here and turn this collar now the tube inside still spins so the collar here is corroded onto the inner tube before as that inner tube turned was dragging this nut with it if I hold it still it still just goes so now we're going to do is put some heat on this collar and see if we can uncie's it from the tube so I'm just heating this collar itself around the outside trying to get that to expand and break the corrosion it's holding it onto the tube there we go it's made a huge difference it's amazing how much heat will free things up unlike the boat we attach the hydraulic steering to this cables not coming out very easily which is a good indication that is where this stiffness is coming from inside that tube so I'm going to use a hammer and just punch it through you can see here this old grease here is what we're looking at getting out once the steering rods flush with the tube you're going to need some sort of drift some sort of rod to punch it all the way through I'm going to run a bit of heat over this tube as well just try and soften some of the grease and make it easier to hammer it through a little bit of a tip for lighting these torches is you you turn the map gas on first so this is a map map gas oxygen torch it's a little bit harks is quite a windy day but often when you turn the oxygen off you can actually just blow the flame out so if you turn the turn the map gas on light it is the close the map gas and tool the flame comes right back and touches the nozzle then you can start to add oxygen slowly and it should keep lit you don't need too much oxygen for this because you don't want a really hot flame all right let's give it a go now now you can see as per the instructions I've gently slid the steering rod out from the till - yeah right by having this out now I've actually isolated three parts of the system I can now move the outboard independently I can now turn the helm again and see whether this cable comes in and out really freely if it doesn't it's either the cable of the helm if it does and this turns freely it's resistance inside this tool tube so there are three or four possibilities really your helm your cable the tilt tube here or the pivot tube of the motor turning the helm then was nice and easy so I don't think there's any problem with the helmet self or this cable but I do think we have a problem with old grease in between the inner tube or the inner rod and the outer rod here and also a problem with grease and corrosion inside this tool tube and that's what we're going to clean up grease on this inner tube can be a real problem as well as causing resistance between the two if you have enough old grease here as you go and wine the helm and this cable comes in it can actually pack up against grease here and sort of not go any further a bit of a sort of a hydro lock sort of thing so this needs to be have a really light coating of grease but no packed up grease behind here at all so we'll start by cleaning this rod and then we'll move on to the tip tube to clean this up I'm just going to use a rag and some carburetor cleaner because I'm just looking to dissolve this old grease I'm hoping none of this is any serious corrosion it certainly came off the inner rod pretty easily grease on this outer rods a little bit more tenacious so I might go and find a little wire brush or something and just see if I can get this off without scratching the stainless what I'm finding is working the best with this one actually is just running a razor blade at a really shallow angle the same way you might to get a sticker off glass or something like that doesn't leave any scratches but it is getting this old grease off the thing about this old grease is as well as having no lubricating qualities it all serves to increase the diameter of this rod making it a tighter fit in that tube all right that's the bulk of the grease off this rod now so what I'm gonna do is move on to that tube my absolute preferred tool for those tubes are these wire spiral brushes this one unfortunately which I think I showed you in the hydraulic steering video is slightly too large this tube and I need to order some more smaller ones so we have to make do what we've got first thing I do is spray some more carburetor cleaner into the tube just try and soften that grease up it's not a particularly aggressive first phase but we're going to start with is just cutting a small piece of rag once I've got a little bit of rag I'm just going to roll it up into a bit of a wad bit of a roll so get with carb cleaner feed it into the tube and then push it all the way through with the rod it can be a pretty tight fit so bit of having to get it in then I'm just going to load it up more carb cleaner and because it is a tight fit sometimes you need to hammer this through same way is the steering cable itself so now I'm just going to do that again backwards and forwards a few times another thing you can try if you've got some really nasty sort of built-up grease or corrosion is actually it's a straight rod by angling it you can angle it against the wall to sort of scrape along the wall of it a bit it's a little bit aggressive but somewhat you need to go that far the absolute final step if you can't get this clean is to replace it and use a replaceable part now I've done a bit of scraping and got loads of this black it's actually quite gritty probably a combination of old grease and rust now I'm going to go back to the rag a few times just to clean that loose stuff out I can't really get the camera in to show you how clean the tube is now but it's a lot better than it was the pivot tube is mild steel I presume it has some sort of coating on it the protects it from corrosion so once you start scouring it presumably that coating comes off so if yours is getting particularly bad you might want to think about just replacing it I'll do a video on that one day promise but we'll push on for now because I'm happy with how clean that is now I'm going to put a really light coat of this this particular one is a white lithium grease buy worth wd-40 also do a specialist range white lithium grease that kind of thing putting a really light coating like that I don't want a bulk of grease to be there stuck behind this rod so very light coatings and then the same for the outside of this tube that's it you don't want bolts of even like a marine grease you don't want slabs of that thicker style grease a thinner light aerosol grease like this is perfect now I'm going to go and wind the helm so that this K will retract so I can fit it back in the hardest part of getting this back in is getting the angle you need somebody once commented on the changing a steering cable while I was hammering it and often it is the only way to get it in because of the angle it's at it can be really really tight there's just no straight shot at it doesn't mean the tube still really gummed up just means you can't get the angle you need to slide it in alright it's in now I could push it in I wouldn't say it's slid in nicely but I think it's 100 percent better than when we had to hammer it out with quite a bit of force now I'll put it all back together and we'll see what it feels like before I wind this off I'm just going to clean this thread up a little bit because it was quite corroded before as you saw that collars now tightened up to the point where the actual tube starting to spin again so I'm pretty happy with that all right let's recap that draggling because this is a really critical link I'm going to use a new stainless nylock nut as well because a bit of that grease now rubbed off through the tube I'm just going to give this one last coating here and we'll give it a test that's much smoother now so I think we can call that fixed now the purpose this video wasn't to kind of replicate a lot of the stuff we went through with the changing a cable video it was more about not going and changing a cable if that's not the problem first step to me is always just separate the outboard from the steering see whether it's part of the steering then the outboard and then once you've got the cable out you can actually see whether it's the tool to be cleaned or whether it's actually the cable and the helm that's corroded up so they're your choices your solutions are either simple like this clean the grease out of the tool tube clean the steering rod itself clean the pivot tube of the outboard probably the hardest job to do out of all of these or replace the cable or the helm if either those are faulty it can be a little bit harder to tell whether it's your helm that's faulty or your cable this boat actually had that problem previously and what you found is that the helm would move really smoothly and then all of a sudden come to a stop and that's a situation where one of the teeth in the helm and the spiral cable is binding up you can open the home and have a look sometimes it's actually the spiral section of cables unraveled sometimes as the helm if it turns reasonably well through its whole travel but it's really stiff and it's not connected to the outboard then it's likely corrosion in the steering cable until you can push oil right the way through the cable using compressed air like I've done in a couple of other videos but I found it to be a little bit less successful than it is with the control cables if that tilt tube we looked at today was a bit beyond repair it's also replaceable in order to do that you need to support the whole weight of the motor because the motor hangs off that tube once you take it out nothing's holding the motor onto the boat so it's a little bit bigger job because of that that's all alright well thanks for watching I hope this video helps you diagnose your steering trouble if you're having it and helps you fix it if you're having this particular problem if not I do have those other videos that I'll put links to in the description as well all right we'll take care of the day and I'll catch you soon see ya

Channel: Dangar Marine

Views: 575,135

Keywords: boat, marine, outboard motor, fix, repair, stiff steering, seized steering, cable steering, outboard, tight steering, boat steering, teleflex cable steering

Id: tfMn6bGfAKs

Length: 17min 13sec (1033 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 06 2016