Page 35 - Yachter Autumn 2024

APPLYING A TURK’S HEAD KNOT ON A STEERING WHEEL
I find that knowing when my boat’s steering wheel is centred is very useful when manoeuvring my boat. I have employed many and various methods of marking the ‘dead ahead’ position on boats that I have borrowed/chartered/sailed over the years and these have ranged from using a cable tie or using a wrap of masking tape. Having installed a couple of new leather steering wheel covers in the past few years on my own boats, I have opted for the more permanent and aesthetically pleasing solution of fitting a Turk’s Head knot using paracord.
The methodology of tying the knot
itself is fairly easy and there are lots of
videos on YouTube that assist -although some are better than others. I found this
one most helpful: https://youtu.be/ dDdQErjCQxU?si=lRo6M95sn3RuDZY- or search ‘3L4B turk's head- woggle’.
I found the problem with all of the videos on the subject is that whilst it is relatively easy to tie the knot on an old bit of broom stick or length of plastic pipe that you can swivel and rotate (as shown on the YouTube videos), it
is not so easy to tie the knot when trying to apply it to something that is fixed and can’t be swivelled and moved, like a steering wheel.
Here’s what I (eventually) realised - instead of rotating the broomstick or plastic pipe or whatever, one option is to simply rotate the knot, while you construct it, on whatever it is you are tying it to. But if you are applying a
Turk’s Head to a leather covered wheel, you will not easily be able to rotate the knot as you construct it - the friction of the leather against the paracord make this difficult. I needed
to find a way of rotating the knot over the leather. I therefore used a small piece of plastic cut from a milk carton, held loosely in place with a couple of cable ties, and used this to cover the leather wheel. This allowed the knot to be rotated, whilst allowing me to remove the plastic before tightening the knot in the correct position.
Once I was sure I had determined the ‘top dead centre’ position of the wheel, I simply removed the plastic insert and worked the knot tight using a mandrel*. I made sure that the ends of the knot ended up at the bottom (the under-side of the wheel) so that when I cut off the excess paracord with a hot knife, this was not visible.
I found that practicing tying the knot multiple times using a short piece of piping made the final installation on the steering wheel very quick and easy. Total cost was just a few quid and a bit of time.
Bill Gray
*A mandrel is basically a short hollow metal tube with the same diameter as your paracord. The end of the cord fits into the mandrel, giving you an easy way to thread the cord to make
the knot. I find that a short length of masking tape around the join between the mandrel and cord helps keep the cord secure. A mandrel is
not essential, but they’re cheap and it makes constructing the knot much easier to poke the cord through to make the knot.
TURKS HEAD KNOT 35