Inside IYRS Blog

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Systems Report: Trip to Edson

Feb 9

Written by: Tom
2/9/2012 10:00 PM

Site Visit, by Beth

Last week, the systems class went on a site visit to Edson Marine in New Bedford.

The president, Will Keene,

gave us a tour of the facility. He also took apart a steering pedestal and showed us some tricks to make maintenance and re-assembly easier. We had a hands-on lesson in some differences between control cables, and improvements made to the pedestal systems over the years. Edson maintains files on every boat they have provided steering systems for. If you are working on an Edson system and aren’t sure exactly what you’ve got and what you need, you can call them up with the boat manufacturer, model and year, and they will look it up.

They have some amazingly precise steering systems for big racing sailboats, as well as the standard Edson pedestals in a million basic racer/cruisers built in the past 30 years (or more). They also have some really nice powerboat steering setups, many of them customized for a manufacturer and boat model.

We have some Edson pedestals in the shop, and this week we’ve been taking turns setting them up.

I am particularly interested in this, as I have an Edson pedestal on my own 27’ sailboat. It is 24 years old, and it still looks good:

However, it’s time to replace the chain/cable assembly and I am very glad I just did it on the bench. It’s going to be a whole lot harder in the bottom of the lazarette.

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1 comment(s) so far...

Re: Systems Report: Trip to Edson

You will learn a lot if you are on the field and doing the actual thing. It is certainly great if your mentors are there to guide you.

By plumbing on 2/13/2012 4:18 PM

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