mmiller wrote:
Quote:
"Fail-safe" means you keep the occupants safe
Exactly! Allowing an easily replaced part to fail to avoid damage that could compromise the hull... keeps sailors safe. You can replace a pin and you can use a paddle to steer, but you can't help yourself if the hull were to fail.
The possibility of losing the steering at any time or the aka suddenly and unexpectedly collapsing resulting in the boat immediately overturning during rough seas is certainly not helping to keep sailors safe. Rather, the shear pins of the rudder and aka are protecting the too fragile for the purpose mechanisms from damage.
I don't see the rudder shear pin protecting the hull at all. The TI's hull is flexible and strong at the transom, if there was an impact in that area, the hull could easily take it and the boat would simply move about in the water. I've impacted the hull on my TI in the transom area many times with a much harder force than what breaks the rudder pin, and it didn't even leave a mark. The hull is incredibly flexible and strong, that component was very well designed. It doesn't even make any sense to say that the rudder's shear pin is protecting the hull, there's no such mechanism or need to protect the TI hull from such impacts anywhere else. The rather fragile plastic rudder would
always break before the very strong hull anyway, even if it had no shear pin.
Rather, the rudder shear pin is simply protecting the fragile plastic rudder components, which, as everyone who owns a TI knows, cannot take such an impact. This does make sense since it's far better to replace the shear pin rather than the whole rudder assembly on the water. However, if these rudder components were instead made of a marine-grade metal or perhaps carbon-fiber, they could withstand 10X or more times the impact of the plastic components before failing. You could still include a shear pin, but the pin could be multitudes stronger and far less likely to fail than the thin plastic pin protecting the rather fragile plastic components of the rudder.
The same is true with the aka shear pins. The TI's hull is so strong that you can easily lift the entire boat where the aka's attach. It can easily take a significant impact there. What the aka shear pin is protecting is not the hull or the occupants, but rather the aka extension mechanism itself which is fragile enough that it could bend on impact. This could be resolved with stronger components and/or a spring mechanism or a nitrogen gas shock absorber that would absorb the shock of an impact thus protecting the aka and then immediately spring back to safely protect the occupants from the boat overturning, as can now easily occur when the plastic shear pin breaks and the ama is rendered useless.
I don't know why Hobie doesn't get this. No one would ever design a car's steering system to break on a relatively minor impact just to protect the steering system components but then render the car unsteerable and dangerous to the occupants. Would you buy a car that did or think it was an adequate design? Rather it's always designed with enough shock absorption and adequately strong enough components to absolutely ensure, as best as possible, that the steering does not fail in relatively normal circumstances.
There's no question Hobie can do better here. Two of the absolute worst things that can happen to any boater is to suddenly lose steering or to overturn, especially in rough water, yet this is what can and has happened when these "fail-safes" activate. Again, most TI owners know this and it's why almost all of us have had to implement our own modifications to mitigate the TI's well-known safety issues such as with the aka safety line mod that most of us implement in one form or another. This is nothing new, it's been a
huge topic of discussion on this forum for over a decade, yet Hobie has never addressed or corrected it. To Hobie's credit, they did correct the issue with the akas coming loose and falling out, but why stop there? No boat owner should ever have to routinely modify a boat to mitigate a manufacturer's inadequate safety designs. That is simply unacceptable.