Quote:
Originally Posted by Terry England
. . . I finally busted the stringers loose in it and split the bottom in it. The Wellcraft V-20 had a very long continuous production run. Still a lot of them around these parts of Florida.
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I had started a reply to TE's post but just saw Capt. Terry's story about the V-20 which made that rough Gulf Stream crossing with me and the Unohu, and he described the damage much better than I could have since he helped repair it! When the skipper of the Unohu heard of this particular failure, he said "That's the 6th V-20 I've heard about that's busted up! It's the Best Looking/Worst Riding Deep-V ever made!"
With all due respect to Big Shrimpin, who I know is a big fan of the V-20 and maybe the father of the web site, I knew 3 more guys at Pratt with V-20's who had similar problems with loose stringers and big hull cracks! The V-20 was not well thought of in S. Fla. in the late 70's due to those problems, but for those boats to have been in production for so long, they certainly must have fixed that problem in the later boats. If Tim can enlighten us as to when the fixes were made, I'm sure bgreene and others would like to know about it.
One of the Wellcrack V-20 owners I knew well was a Phd type in the Applied Research Group and was also a professor that taught several night courses I took for my Masters degree in Mech. Engineering at UF's Extension Center in WPB, so naturally he researched the hell out of the failure on his boat when he tore it apart to fix it! Dr. Marv concluded that there were 2 major reasons the stringers had come loose from the hull:
1. The factory neglected to fully saturate the wood when they glassed the stringers to the hull, so the resin had soaked into the wood, leaving the glass cloth almost dry and poorly bonded to the wood, so it had pulled loose from the stringer!
2. Instead of installing the stringers at the flat strakes, which were simply reinforced with cardboard mailing tubes, they located them in between the strakes, and didn't even bother to saw the bottom of the stringers at an angle to match the deadrise of the hull - they just cut them square, so only the 90 degree sharp edge of the stringer was actually in contact with the hull! The crack occurred where the hull was bending around that sharp edge.
Dr. Marv said he had 2 major complaints with the hull design, in addition to the poor construction quality. The first was that there was not nearly enough reserve buoyancy in the bow. Although the hull had a huge amount of flare in the bow, it was all in about the top 4" of the hull with very little volume in the lower part of the bow, so when you dropped off a wave or the bow punched into a big steep wave at trolling speed, it gained a lot of downward momentum before the water reached the sudden flare, and he'd end up taking green water over the bow. He said he'd actually had green water over the bow, up the windshield, and over the Navy top snapped to the top of windshield and into back of the boat! His other complaint that the lower strake dropped down to only a few inches from the bottom of the V back about 6' from the bow. The strakes were fairly wide, so you ended up with a couple of wide strakes separated by only a few inches of V, so the result was basically similar to just having a wide flat panel for a keel, which caused it to really slam in a chop!
One of the 3 guys actually noticed a problem with the loose stringers in his V-20 before the hull cracked . . . his son was driving it one day and he was sitting in the back as they crossed over a wake in the ICW, and he saw the floor move! Said the boat flexed like a wobbly noodle as it went over the wake!
Regarding TE's earlier "Homework" comment and the Alim vs. SeaCraft sea trials, a better link is
"The Amazing Mr. Moesly" article from Professional Boatbuilder Magazine on Carla's website. The sea trial is described on about page 9 of this
EXCELLENT 15 page article.