Adjustment of your outboard steering

Posted by admin in Outboard Motor, Steering & Trim on 01 23rd, 2010 | 3 responses

If you are finding that your steering is overly stiff and that your are having trouble turning the wheel or if it feels like when you are turning that it is going to break. It may even make it very hard to throttle and steer?

How to make adjustments to the steering to either loosen or tighten it:

Warning, driving with a stiff steering may be dangerous and you should not drive your boat until it is fixed.

If the motor is new, check the tension bolt to see if the installer has not forgotten to loosen it as they sometimes do.

Try removing the headed nut from the bottom of the steering arm and this will help you seperate the helm and the cable from the motor. By doing this you can turn the motor and the steering wheel and find out where it is sticking or struggling to move.
The bolt that attaches to the steering arm of the motor should be a shoulder bolt otherwise the arm needs a space so that the bolt can be tightened so that a nut can be installed.

If you have recently replaced the tie wraps to hold the cables in the gunwall cut them loose to test to see if there are kinks or hard bends in the steering cable. Any bends in the steering cable should be gradual and with a bend radius of at least ten times the diameter of the thickness of the cable of the steering cable.

If you have any other problems and these don’t solve it, please reply and we will try and help.