Early Tracker built Seacrafts

[bgreene]

Originally Posted by Terry England

Alim V-20 (Wellcrack V-20) is what Carl out preformed with the Seacraft 21 in the Bay of Pigs / CIA Sea Trials in Miami. You'er scraping the guardrail on the Seacraft learning curve, Bro' - catch up. (LOL)

(Homework lesson - www.moeslyseacraft.com)

Yeh, yeh......... I know the story, 8'-12' seas, winds to 100 knots, giant squid, sea monsters, and the Seacraft handled it all...
That may be, but I catch my share of fish on my V21 and it is a beauty !

[Terry England]

Originally Posted by bgreene

Yeh, yeh......... I know the story, 8'-12' seas, winds to 100 knots, giant squid, sea monsters, and the Seacraft handled it all...
That may be, but I catch my share of fish on my V21 and it is a beauty !

I ran a one of the rare V-17 Wellcraft CC for years (not the 18'). I think that hull (Alim) still holds the Miami to New York outboard speed record for that size boat (16'-8"). I used to think about just jumping in the water right after I launched the boat and get it over with, because I was going to get wet in that Open Fisherman. 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.

[Capt Terry]

I cannot speak for newer Wellcrafts, but as previously described on CSC by Bushwasker, one of my best friends probably in the late 70's severely cracked a Wellcraft V-20 on the same return trip from the Bahamas that Unoho (a Moesly 21) and Bushwacker (20' Seafari) came through pretty much unscathed. I had been on this boat several times. The Wellcraft had longitudinal cracks perhaps 6 - 8' long. My friend tried to get Wellcraft to repair it even for a fee. They gave him some tips (apparently there had been a lot of them), but refused to do it. I helped remove/reinstall the inner liner and was appalled by the shoddy construction previously unseen. The stringers were maybe 5/8" lumber with what appeared to be only one layer of roving up & over the top of the stringer. The glass broke at the fillet radius of the stringer to the hull. After my friend's repair it was a much more solid & quieter boat. Guess that explained the noise when hitting a bad wake or wave! From then on we referred to Wellcrafts as crackcrafts. Wellcraft certainly has sold a lot of boats; I hope they are better built than my friend's boat.

[Bushwacker]

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.

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.

[bgreene]

Having run about 20 miles southward along the coast of NJ in building S/ SE wind, and increasingly rough conditions, I know my 1996 V21 doesn't flex.......

SeaCraft, Wellcraft, doesn't matter much in that most of them were built with a lot of wood, and either need new transoms or have had new after 20 - 30 years of use. A very few such as mine were either stored for many years, and not kept in water and covered resulting in solid original condition.

Back to the original topic - of warp in hull, hard to know how many SeaCrafts were built with the reportedly " bad mold," and what corners Tracker was cutting when they produced the boats.

[bumpdraft]

Just my 2 cents here. A close friend of mine used to have an 18 Seacraft many years ago. For personal reasons he had to sell it. Some years later(late 80's), he got back into owning a boat again. He bought a 20' Wellcraft.
By this time I had bought my 85- 18' Seacraft new. Soon after my friend got his Wellcraft, we took one of our many trips to Marquesas. As was usual for the time of year, we were met with 2-3 foot seas near the islands. On the way back, I noticed that he was lagging back a bit in the chop. When we got back home he told me "I'm selling this thing". He bought an 89- 20' Tracker/Seacraft that he said gave him the ride that he was used to.
I did notice that when I was standing on the ground next to his boat and he was walking around in it, the floor was flexing quite a bit and he is no huge guy. It seemed to me that the Tracker was a lighter built boat.

[Bigshrimpin]

Originally Posted by Bushwacker

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!

I did start the v20 site and passed it off to MJ in 2007 after the site went down on Christmas day in 2006. The Alim v20 design is from 1960/1 with slight variations up through the v21 in 1996. None of them were built to last especially the early wellcraft ones 1970 - 1978. There's only one fix IMO for the V20 construction and it's the a reason I own a seacraft now ; ) and that's all I'll say about the subject. If you want a better C Raymond hunt design than the v20 check out the Hiliner 21 / 222 (which is the 2.0 improved version of the 20 bertram).

Some interesting similarities b/w the Hiliner and seacraft . . .

1. Big Box foam filled stringer grid


2. C Raymond Hunt designed a water ballast system for the hiliner hull in the early 1970's that was later built into the Hiliner 222 superfisherman models.

3. Hiliner 222 hull competed and even place first in class in some late 60's offshore races (These were the races after the decision to allow non-production hulls to enter races)

[Snookerd]

Tracker hulls through the late 80's have not shown to have structural failures. There are stories of a few Sceptres that had glassed in weights in the stringers to improve CG and wood in the stringers -according to Father Frank in some of his hull repairs. The stringers should all be glass box stringers. I had 2 Tracker 18Sf's and wouldn't hesitate to buy another 80's Tracker. They have solid plywood cored decks and I did not see any poor work on mine. I actually like the weight on the Tracker boats. They are closer to the original weights than the SIC boats (tanks).

[Snookerd]

Originally Posted by bumpdraft

I did notice that when I was standing on the ground next to his boat and he was walking around in it, the floor was flexing quite a bit and he is no huge guy. It seemed to me that the Tracker was a lighter built boat.

The Tracker boat is a lighter boat. The hatches on the Trackers do have some flex, but the deck has a heavy core and are strong. I have owned 2 Tracker 18's and my parents own an 87 SIC 18. The mid 80's SIC hulls seem to be way stronger! No spider cracks hardly anywhere. The trade off is performance......the 87 SIC has sooo much weight, that the freeboard is way less than a Potter or Tracker 18 with a 140 Zuke. Trust me......

[bgreene]

What's know about 23' Sceptre construction during the last 2 years of build ?

Seems to be 1988's for sale......but very few from the early to mid 80's.
Wonder if this is a coincidence or there were issues with the Tracker final production year.
Thanks