These photos show the way I dealt with replacing the bearing on the rudder shaft on my Tayana 37 PH boat.

The bearing at the top of the steering post failed during our passage from Vanuatu to Australia.  I was able to cut some pieces of polyethylene off the end of a cutting board and force them into the bearing.  That worked fine for the rest of that 1000-mile passage.

Tayana kept insisting that it was possible to get the bearing off without dropping the rudder and I spent a couple hundred bucks of yard labor trying to do that.  Eventually I gave up and had a hole cut in the deck so I could swap out the bearing.  Dropping the rudder would have been a major pain and too expensive.  Two of the attached photos show the hole and the SS plate the yard made to cover the hole after the new bearing had been fitted.  

The bearing is still in service but I’m glad to have an easy way to replace it next time.

BTW, the off-the-shelf bearing had to be machined to fit the rudder post on my boat.

John Lewis
s/v Active Transport
Marina del Rey, CA