Lost steering control Yamaha 2023 222x.

[toddgray519]

With the boat off I went to check and see when turning the steering wheel if rudder would move it didn’t By hand I could freely move rudder back and forth

Has anyone encountered this before
Can someone tell me if this is a know problem

 

[Thermobrett]

Sounds like a steering cable. If the pump will move by hand but the wheel free spins, something either came loose or broke. I would also check the pump bolts to make sure nothing backed out or fell out and that the rudder is seated correctly. I posted the below a few years back with a similar situation when all of a sudden my steering locked in one direction, but this was due to the rudder being wedged behind my steering fins when the bolt dropped out. Might be a place to start looking??

Ok, so I posted a thread last month on the missing bottom jet pump nozzle bolt that fell out while in the water and locked my rudder behind me CJS fin causing me to loose right hand steering until I could asses the issue and fix it. Today while on the Manatee River, my top bolt that holds the nozzle to the pump fell out. Thankfully I couldn’t tell until I finished flushing and washing the boat and spraying my rust/corrosion spray in the steering cable sheath and noticed the nozzle seemed loose. Further inspection showed the bold completely missing. Since I had this problem before, I bought a couple extra bolts and had them in the garage. When I ran the new bolt through the nozzle to the pump housing and manually moved the nozzle left to right, I could see the bolt spinning back out. As an engineer, when a company launches a product they do a DFMEA and a PFMEA to find failures within the process or design. Why did they not just through bolt the nozzle to the pump and put a nylon nut on the back side to prevent this since it is already through tapped and can be used as a pin?
below are of the rudder stuck behind my steering fin when the bottom bolt came out.

This pic is only the missing top bolt.

 

[anmut]

Is that boat equipped with power steering? If so, with the boat off, you may not have steering... just a random guess.