Safire Associates, Unit 008, Solent Business Centre, 343 Millbrook road, Southampton, SO15 0HW
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Urgent repair on auto pilot gear drive
Our customers yacht was having issues on their way over to the England and whilst they were temporarily berthed at Ocean Village in Southampton they had found a broken gear in their auto pilot system. They attempted a quick glue repair but weren’t confident in it as they had to set of to France in the morning so they asked us if we could make a new gear wheel. Which we did in good time so they could set sail on time.
Some before and after pictures here show the gear wheel. You can click on them to see them closer up. The black plastic one has been marked up with red arrows indicating the split.
We had no drawings just the original part to use as a reference for dimensions. Once we extracted the data from the original part we created the cad data for the machines in our workshop.
We waterjet cut the main gear teeth details then machined the slot and bore details on a CNC milling machine.
The gear wheel is quite small, shown here next to a penny for scale you can see the original plastic one and the new one plus a spare just in case!