Alignment Fixtures

[Bob Gray]

Our club has one of Ron Sherry’s alignment fixtures. It’s very accurate and easy to use but it has a problem that took us over 10 years of use to figure out. With aligners on the ice or any other level surface and the rear runners on the aligners, the actual bottom edge of the runner is about one inch above the ice. This is not a problem except that your steering runner is on the ice and it’s about an inch lower. With most planks this would be like unloading over 100 pounds out of the the boat ( if my memory is correct the runners would be toed out a string width or two ). All you have to do to correct this problem is to put a 1” piece of wood etc. under the steering runner when doing an alignment. Any alignment fixture that has the runners sitting any distance above the ice will have the same problem and the same fix would work. The block just has to be the same thickness as the amount the rear runners are elevated.