Steering Gear Intermittent Fault
Intermittent steering hardovers really sap command confidence, and can be devils to track down, so you have my sympathy.
Is
there any pattern to when this happens? Has it happened enough times
to know whether any pattern is significant? Does it happen when people
are doing breakdown drills? Is it always the same helmsman it happens
to? Is it always the same control system, or the same pump?
Is the performance of the gear adequate the rest of the time - good positional accuracy and sweep times?
Before
interfering with anything else, I'd have a quick look at the return
line filters in your steering hydraulic system and judge from the state
of those whether there's much chance of the problem having been caused
by valves having got stuck open by debris.
Assuming the filters
are clean, I'd then start going over the ship's cabling - starting with
the rudder feedback signal, then along the FU demand path from Hand
Steering Unit to Servo Amp. Tug twist and wiggle the cable at every loose loop, every plug break (especially!), and every bulhead
penetration to see if you can recreate the symptoms. Once you've turned
your intermittent fault into a hard fault, diagnosis becomes much
easier.
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