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Autopilot - Raymarine S1G Installation - SO36i

The following article first appeared on the Jeanneau Owners Forum and has been reproduced here by kind permission of Trevor Bird

 

I purchased a Raymarine S1G Smartpilot with a linear drive, someone asked for photos and information about the installation so here goes.

 

Many thanks to Geoff Gritton for his invaluable advice regarding this project.

 

It took all weekend to fit and sea-trial this unit.

 

Firstly the linear drive was fitted. Access is through the port aft storage area. It is secured with 3/8 2" stainless bolts with lock nuts. The mounting holes in the bulkhead are already pre-drilled at the Jeanneau factory which makes it really quite simple. I put wide washers under the head of the bolts to strengthen the timber the drive bracket is mounted on.

Next the rudder sensor had to be mounted. This was the hardest part of the project. I mounted it on a plastic plumbing fitting and reversed the direction compared to the factory mounting to improve the parallelism between the radius of the arc of the rudder quadrant and the radius of the arc of the rudder sensor. The screws mounting the attachment to the rudder quadrant are 4mm metric and the holes are already drilled and tapped at the correct distance between centres on the rudder quadrant.

The computer mounting and flux-gate mounting was fairly simple. We have the 2 cabin version and it is mounted in the port aft storage space.

The mounting of the linear drive and rudder sensor on the quadrant is shown below.

The S1G does most things on the sea-trial automatically. The deviation on the flux-gate compass through 360 degrees was 1 degree which I think is pretty good. After quite a while to automatically adjust for the deviation, the auto-learn function took all of about 20 seconds and then the autopilot was ready for use. It is a bit freaky seeing the helm rotate by itself but we are very happy with the outcome.

 

If anyone wants really detailed information I am happy to provide more detail if it will help.

 

Trevor Bird - Sydney Australia