I discovered that the gudgeon lineup on the rudder of my W32 was an inch out of line with the center gudgeon. I bought a long piece of aluminum shafting to check the lineup, and boy was that out of line. I always wondered why the rudder was always "sticky". I had to take the rudder off anyway to drain and dry it out. I felt uncomfortable with a waterlogged rudder, as that could pop open when the soggy mess on the inside gets frozen.. Same thing with the through hulls too.
Westsail used schedule 40 PVC pipe instead of the fiberglass tubing mentioned in the previous posts for the inside of the gudgeon on mine. Was it an act of revenge on their part? I had a feeling that my presence inspecting the construction of my second boat left the feeling with some employees that I was the customer from hell. There is no fiberglass tube on my boat, just plain ordinary Sched40 PVC pipe. Anyway, I layed up a new gudgeon using West System epoxy. It fits now quite well, with the bore in line with the upper and the bottom gudgeon. Btw., I have a machine shop with a large belt sander to trim and finish the layup. For anyone doing this layup work should consider also purchasing rollers to squeeze the bubbles out and to achieve a high ratio of fiberglass to resin. There are grooved metal rollers and if you can find them brush type rollers. The brush type is better to get rid of the bubbles, but the grooved ones are needed to press the resin through the glass cloth.
PVC pipe is in my opinion ok. There was no significant wear after 10 years of sailing.
Mike
