Steering Difficulties

[DTJones]

My '04 Switch i requires 2 hands and a whole lot of musle to turn the steering wheel. Any suggestions as to what is wrong? How can we fix it?
Thank you for the answers.

[lee]

Replacing the steering cable is what you will need to do ease that stiffness.

[typerider]

yes, the steering cable. my steering was the same last time out and i was praying i could just lube the rudder and all would be gravy but no dammit. its never that easy. alas my steering cable has gone awry and i have to replace it. here's a fun little side note that may or may not have been previously discussed. my '01 22iR has a 16' steering cable but i recently learned that if you flip the under helm part of the steering system 180 and use an 18' cable you can turn that whacky 6" radius bend into a much smoother 8-10" bend and things begin to flow much better. may not help on a v drive but it works on i's for certain.

[lee]

You cannot just flip the rack, if you do the boat will steer opposite. Like when you turn right it will go left....

[typerider]

my tige parts guy told me thats what they do on all the replacements so he must have been talking about flipping something else and i misunderstood... how would you go about doing it so that it works correctly like he was saying?

[FIC]

You have to unbolt the steering column and rotate it 180 than you can reverse the cable rack.

[typerider]

thanks FIC that clears it up alot for me. i'll be doing that later this week maybe i'll take some pictures and put em up on here for everyone.

[typerider]

so the rack/helm flip is totally not needed i found out. i finally installed the new 18' cable yesterday and after talking to my dealer service manager decided its much less of a hassle to just install the longer cable just like the old 16' one went in. the only difference is that the new one has some extra length which actually worked out for the better because it gave me a larger radius bend at the rack anyway. i did however check out the helm and what was needed to flip it over and its pretty simple as FIC said. i may tackle that project one day anyway but for now things are smooth again.