TAKE TO THE SEA

THE (MIS)ADVENTURES OF TWO DREAMERS THAT DO

Open heart surgery: operating

on a broken Raymarine
ST2000+
The Raytheon corporation has been in existence since 1922 and maintains a primary business of
government defense contracting. They are the fifth largest military contractor in the world with over
90% of their revenue coming from defense work, responsible for such products as radar systems,
missile defense systems, communication satellites, and missiles themselves. They also happen to make
relatively inexpensive autopilots for sailboats.
**source:Wikipedia – wouldn’t want anyone to accuse me of doing actual research.

At some point along the way, one of the engineers must have looked at the collection of state of the art
equipment around him and thought, “This would be awesome on my boat.” When he emerged from his
hobby garage a few weeks later with the first electronic autopilot, the management must have looked at
the simple combination of compass, electric push ram, and logic controller and said, “Sure, we’ll sell
that.” Little did they know that fateful day that they would be damning a small division of their
mammoth organization to forever thereafter have to deal with needy boaters with broken equipment in
inconvenient ports around the world.

We have had the Doctor, our Raymarine ST2000+ autopilot, break on us three times in the 4,000 miles
since we left home. The first failure involved some kind of inability for the electronic fluxgate compass
to accurately read our heading. The succeeding two times, the primary symptom was that the pilot
could push the tiller, but not pull.

For the first repair, we waited anxiously in Morro Bay for 5 days while the Doc flew to the Raymarine
repair facility in New Hampshire for a very prompt turnaround. The second time, we were three days
into a 7 day passage of mainland Mexico, so I opted to crack open the case and MacGyver a fix myself.
This repair was effective for several hundred more miles until our last passage after one too many
squalls, which brings us to today’s photo tour and a more robust repair.

Join me on an adventure in voided warranty!

  
First off, I removed the 8 screws on the underside of the unit and cracked the case. There’s a rubber
gasket seal ringing the unit, but it’s easily removable and
replaceable. 

The case is open. This is what $500 buys you. On the left is the electric motor, followed by the gear
assembly, the ram assembly, and the circuit board. We'll be focusing on the gear assembly today.
I removed the 3 screws holding down the circuit board, tilted it up, and and the motor/gear/ram
assembly slides up and out. The round shiny thing in the center-right is the fluxgate compass, which for
the purposes of this tour will remain powered by voodoo and untouched.

Here’s the first of a pair of photos illustrating the nature of the Doc’s problem. See how the rubber belts
are more or less in alignment between the gears? This is necessary to allow full power when cranking
the pushrod in and out. Notice that there’s a bit of a gap behind the right-hand upper metal sprocket.
This is where some kind of washer or bushing used to be, until it was worn away to rubbery slivers
under prolonged operation. I suspect that this was the “planned obsolescence” element of the autopilot
design.
Here is what happens when the autopilot tries to pull the tiller without that bushing behind the big
sprocket. This is all it takes for the pilot to lose nearly all pulling power. It also likely will wear down
the rubber belt over time if left unaddressed. The primary indicator for this problem prior to cracking
the case was that I could grab the push rod and wiggle it in and out with nearly an inch of play. That
was the sprocket moving in and out within the gear assembly. To fix this problem, we’ll need to install
a new bushing.
There are four screws holding the gear assembly together, plus one screw that attaches the motor
ground wire to the right-hand backing plate. Once removed, the two-gear plastic sprocket and the two
belts can slide out. The ram assembly is now fully disconnected from the autopilot unit.
The dual-gear sprocket and belts. The white donut is a nylon washer I had kicking around the junk bin,
which will become the new bushing. The black rubber donut with the slit in it was the temporary
bushing I MacGyvered on our Mexican passage. The last squall must have wiggled it out of place, so
this time around I’ll be going for something that won’t pop out as easily. Harmony tried to buy a spare
parts kit from the Raymarine service shop, and the bemused engineer on the phone responded, “We
don’t sell spare parts here, but why not just buy the smaller ST1000 and use it for parts when you need
it? It’s not expensive – only around $500.” Contractors.
The ram assembly. The gear turns the wormdrive (long screw), which in turn slides the pushrod in and
out. The wormdrive is a pretty powerful design that only needs minimal drive from the small electric
motor in the unit. My suspicion is that the ST1000 is the same as the ST2000, only with a slightly
smaller motor. Don’t quote me on that though.
I removed the set pin from the hole in the sprocket using a jeweler’s screwdriver, a hammer, and gentle
persuasion. The sprocket itself slides off the post with help from two wrenches and a little jiggling.
Sprocket and bushing reinstalled. You can see in the lower-left that the set pin got bent during removal.
I replaced it with a folded piece of stainless steel seizing wired, which fit snug and tapped in smoothly
with a hammer.
The gear assembly reassembled. You can just make out the new bushing on the left side of the
assembly. Before reinstalling, I wiped off the old black grease and daubed on some winch grease to
reduce friction. The new bushing greatly reduced the amount of play in the pushrod and keeps the gears
and belts in alignment.
The rest of the unit reassembled. It took a little finagling to figure out where all the wires are supposed
to run so that the circuit board would fit back down easily.
While I was at it, I put a fresh layer of silicone around the screen and buttons in the top half of the unit.
When I opened up the case, a small pool of water was sitting inside, no doubt the result of the heavy
rains during the squalls on the last passage. It turns out it might have been a good thing the Doctor
kaputzed when it did, otherwise we may have been at risk for a moisture short circuit.