Repairing the gooseneck

James Brooking fabricates and fettles a complicated set of loose joints

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A rigging inspection report informed me that my boat’s gooseneck toggle and boom’s forward-end casting were worn. I enquired about replacement parts but was told they were likely to be unobtainable.

No single element in the system was worn to excess, but in combination there was a lot of slack.

The only DIY solution in cases such as these is to replace the fixings with slightly larger diameter pieces and then ream out the receiving parts to as tight a tolerance as possible.

The toggle connects the vertical pin with the horizontal pin in the gooseneck joint. Both pins were 10mm diameter. The next realistic metric size is 12mm but the imperial size 7 ⁄16in is 11.11mm. I found that a 7 ⁄16 bolt would not fit into either part, which shows how little wear it takes to make a lot of movement in a complex joint.