I finally got around to hooking up the KajakSport skeg controls. What I figured would be a few minute job turned into an ordeal that lasted a couple of hours. After I had the cable and and control box hooked up, the skeg movement was VERY stiff and would not move the whole range of movement!! I fiddled with various positions of the knob on the cable and with the routing of the cable as well but to no avail!! It was so tight as to be unusable!!! Needless to say I was getting very frustrated - especially after I stripped the set screw for the cable!!! (Luckily I had a larger one that just threaded right in. Crisis averted)

I knew that the ridges inside the skeg box were a bit tight a while back and I thought that the sanding I did was enough - but apparently not!!! After rereading a post I made on here several months ago, I decided to "revisit" the ridge problem. Sure enough, the ridges were still leaving rub marks on the skeg, indicating that they were still too right. I took a piece of 150 grit sandpaper and tried to work it between the skeg blade and the ridge. Believe it or not, the clearance was too small to let a single layer of thin sandpaper between.!! Once I managed to get the sandpaper between the blade and ridge and rubbed the ridges down ever so slightly. Then I checked the movement of the skeg via the control and BADDA BOOM, BADDA BINg. finally some nice smooth action!!!

Kevin raised this matter before on this board, and now that I've experienced this firsthand, I think that KajakSport should make their customers aware of this potential problem. I can see a lot of new skeg cables being kinked and destroyed by the friction caused by these ridges. Plus I can see a lot of builders losing hair and being driven to drink by the frustration!!! I can tell you that I drank a few Guinness during the whole operation and then had a few more to celebrate when I got the damn thing working!!

With the skeg now finally finished, I'm just a few small jobs away from finishing this project.

Yay me!!!