[Moderator]

I just got this response via email from Mathway Parsons, who still manufacture these steering units:

Quote:

Thank you for your email with regards to our Mathway steering on your new vessel, I take it you are referring to the right angle boxes, their are a none oil fill able unit, these unit are self contained and are filled on manufacture with an oily base grease which wont need replacing, you are correct if you strip these units you will loose the contents but also the set of the boxes, the aft end box which controls the rudder is again oily based grease but this can be topped up however this is very rare that is done, that also goes for the helm unit,
All our Mathway gears are manufactured to last some 40years, in fact we have units in vessels some 50 plus years that still haven’t been replaced.
Because of our manufacture structure their are no manuals on service guides for our systems.
I hope this is of help to you.

So now I am confused. In the Nicholson Yahoo group, Arild (Far Out # 10) and Larry (unknown) had a conversation about these being oil baths with fill plugs, yet Mathway says they are not. Are there 2 different steering gears on Nic 38’s that are confusing the story? I need to get down and take some photos of our ‘oil baths’ so maybe we can talk with pictures.

[Moderator]

Thanks for the suggestion, Jeremy. I tried emailing them a few months ago, and they did not respond. But if at first you don’t succeed, try try again.

[Moderator]

Thanks for giving us an update as to your cruising adventures. I just moved this topic within the forum from the support category to cruising category, since you’ve given us all a nice update of your whereabouts.

Sorry for the missing mailto link. Writing to me, the moderator, through this forum certainly works. But you can also email me at:
Rainshadow(at)driftwoodkey.com
I am writing this not as a proper email address because I want to avoid some bot finding my email address on this site, and sending me loads of spam.

I’ve updated the Member Directory to reflect your new location, but leaving it a bit vague “Cruising Atlantic coast Europe” since I bet you’ll keep moving along. Does that work?

[Moderator]

I’ve posted what we finally decided to do on our blog. You can read the details here:
http://svrainshadow.com/?p=604

The short answer is we used Sanitred products to apply a flexible coating. It was a tough job, let’s hope it works!

[Moderator]

I’m a bit desperate for the Mathway Steering manual – do you have that? We cannot figure out how to open the oil bath chambers so check the oil level.

On Rainshadow, we also have many original manuals, sans the Mathway one. For example, we have the Nico autopilot manual. So we also offer to scan manuals if someone needs one.

[Author]

Posts