Hello all… joined your forum to pass along something i think might help some people out. I’m active on some other forums for other interests and thought it would be worth joining to pass this along.
So, I have a North Shore Atlantic RM that I love, but had some problems with the skeg cable. As countless others have, I kinked my cable through carelessness in a rocky area and immediately ordered another cable, thinking that all i needed to do was replace the cable. Long story short, I did nothing for a while… I got the kink out as best I could but in the course of trying to do that the box got all jammed up and I got frustrated and just let it be and paddled. As you can imagine, a windy day came and I had to work way to hard trying to have fun and determined that I needed to figure this thing out. What had happened in addition to the cable kink was that the carbon tube got damaged and the brass ferrule on the poly cable housing was no longer attached to the housing so even when everything else seemed to be okay, no skeg action at all. I looked around on line and called a couple of places and no one really seemed to have an answer on how to keep the brass ferrule on the cable housing. Now its possible that because I’m a bicycle freak, I made this a bigger deal than it really was but bike cables and skeg cables are essentially the same kind of thing and this was a broken system! Some people mentioned putty and epoxy but these did not seem like a long lasting solution to the situation that I seemed to have. Nothing sticks very well to polyethylene, especially epoxy! The problem was that the brass ferrule would not stay attached to the cable housing. The cable housing is polyethylene which is affected by heat, so I decided to try using heat to solve the problem. I took my skeg box apart (again!) and pulled the skeg itself down to get the cable out of the housing at the box end. Next I put the brass ferrule where it needed to be on the housing. Then I took a good pistol grip soldering iron set pretty low and held it against the brass ferrule until I could see that the heat was affecting the poly housing (hint: don’t do this for too long, just long enough for the brass to “settle in” a little bit) . Let that cool for a moment, all that is really doing is getting the brass to stay in place for the next step… The next and final step is to take that soldering iron and gently melt the end of the poly housing so it kind of “mushrooms” a bit over the brass ferrule; not too much, just enough to make it very difficult for the housing to pull through that brass. Also take care to not restrict the inner diameter of the cable housing. If it does get a little smooshed inward just trim it with a razor knife a bit. Check to see that the cable can run through there easily, and that’s it! It may sound complicated because I’m trying to be very clear, but it takes very little time to do when you are actually in there. I lubed my cable with a paraffin based bike chain lube the full length and reassembled the box and it works great! I went out yesterday in nice big water and had a good old time, confident once again ( I think!) in my skeg deployment. I hope this helps someone!
Thanks for sharing. Pictures would be nice to help with understanding what you’ve done.