MacGregor 26M ... Made in China !

[Versatile]

MacGregor 26M ... Made in China !!!

http://hisonmarine.en.made-in-china.com ... log-1.html

What do you think about that

[K9Kampers]

Nice find Versatile...but we were there just a few months ago...chinese copy

[Versatile]

Thank you !

[mastreb]

I think it's a photo of a Costa Mesa made MacGregor on a Chinese website. There's a plaque on the side that clearly says "MacGregor"--you'd think they'd at least leave that off.

Likely they bought one to copy, and took photos of the one they're copying to post on their website.

The problem with this kind of reverse engineering is that while you could actually take a boat apart and make the layup molds from an original, you have no idea how many layers of fiberglass and resin to lay down in the different locations to create the requisite strength. MacGregor has been doing this for 35 years, building both larger and smaller boats, and has created a lot of industrial know-how about how to fabricate these boats so that they hold up.

For example, if you used a "chopper gun" to spray fiberglass and resin in a single shot, you're not going to get the same strength as a glass fabric in large swaths, which is how Macs are built. Areas on the Mac where hardware is attached are built up in "hard points" that are many times thicker than the broad expanses of the boat, which is why if you're going to hit something with a Mac, you definitely want to be "bow forward"--the bow is substantially stronger than the sideboard. It's also why you should almost never drill and attach hardware on the boat--use a stanchion or mount right next to other existing hardware, or put a platen on the other side of the fiberglass to spread stress.

The factory built a demonstrator with BWY called the "La Perla Negra" or Black Pearl that had one layer less fiberglass than the standard boat to save weight (300 lbs.). It was built to test the concept of a factory "heavy dagger board" that would be weighted at the bottom to more closely approximate the handling characteristics of a full keel sailboat. While it worked well in terms of performance, the boat started having cracking issues at the deck seam amidships. These boats really are engineered at the limit, and a copy that doesn't carry forward the industrial engineering and experience of the factory is going to be little more than a death trap IMHO.

Matt

[Divecoz]

Matt where did you acquire your information about the cracks? From the new owner??
As for taking things apart and copying exactly or as exactly as you desire? Its been done for years.. Yamaha did it to Johnson Outboards years ago.
International Patent infringement court proved, just that .. To No Avail.... The straw was Yamaha's inability to explain a casting block left on and never used...Johnson showed what it had been intended for...blablabla
Buy Made In America its what makes America work!

[mastreb]

Matt where did you acquire your information about the cracks? From the new owner??
As for taking things apart and copying exactly or as exactly as you desire? Its been done for years.. Yamaha did it to Johnson Outboards years ago.
International Patent infringement court proved, just that .. To No Avail.... The straw was Yamaha's inability to explain a casting block left on and never used...Johnson showed what it had been intended for...blablabla
Buy Made In America its what makes America work!

When I was buying my boat at the factory Mike Inmon told me how the Pearl was built and indicated that they'd had that cracking problem. I'm quite certain it's been both correctly repaired and re-inforced, but it was key to the factory's decision not to go any thinner on the layup of the 26M in order to save weight.

As for reverse engineering--sure, anything can be reverse engineered. I just question how long it will take them to really "get it right"--as Yamaha outboards did take years to catch up to the quality of the Johnson's they copied. They got there (and surpassed them) as will the Chinese eventually, but it ain't this year.