The Nature of Used Boats

By Bert W. Quay, AMS #204 ©2000

Flawed Original Construction

    Every production (stock) fiberglass boat is designed, engineered, and built to a particular usage concept and price level that the manufacturer believes will sell to his targeted niche market.

    A few boats were intended to routinely go far offshore in any weather, and were heavily built of solid conventional laminates, or lightly built of exotic materials. In either case, the requisite toughness was expensive to build in.

    Others were intended to provide reasonable comforts for occasional moderate-weather excursion in relatively protected water, and were more moderately built of light solid or cored layups, making them affordable to large numbers of skippers.

    Many boats were intended to offer maximum interior room and family features at the lowest price, and were built to the minimum material and labor standards for use in perfect weather.

    All boats look good when they're new, even though the best and most expensive of them have laminate flaws and installation mistakes built right in at the factory. (Fortunately, the builder doesn't charge extra for them.) But as we find out several years down the way, there's more to a boat than just the shine. And many of them don't age very well..

Hand Made Toys

    We live in a consumer society where thousands of machine-made products are available to us off the shelf the instant we want them. The production runs of those items are seldom less than a million exactly identical units, so a great deal of engineering is committed in advance to ensuring zero-defects in their function, construction, and appearance.

    Western consumers expect everything they buy to work right out of the box, and to continue to work without much attention until they are obsoleted by the next version or model of the gadget. And they are seldom disappointed. Because there is less maintenance and less repair done on more delightfully complicated products than ever in man's history.

    By contrast, ALL BOATS ARE HAND MADE! 500 units represents a very long run for any stock boat model above 30 feet or $100,000. But "stock" is not the same thing as "machine manufactured" in the sense of the "no hassle" product that consumers have come to expect from all their purchases. Except for their house, most boat buyers have never owned anything the size and complexity of a boat that is hand made. So it's little surprise that they don't know what to reasonably expect from their boat.

    Conventional fiberglass hulls and decks are built in cavity molds by hand laying in the fabric layers and core, and wetting out the materials with hand-sprayed and hand rolled resin. Even the advanced SCRIMP vacuum bag method of layup requires human arrangement of the materials and human monitoring of the process.

    Boat-building quality depends on human factors at both management and labor levels. The primary impact of stock model boat production is to allow increasing use of less skilled (and cheaper) labor in fabrication and assembly to get the cost/price down and sales up. The dominant pattern of boat-builder ownership is for the founders to sell out to the corporate raiders in good times, or hand it over to rescuers in hard times. And the bean counters who know little and care nothing about boats get control in either case.

    "As the dominant factor in a climate of intense financial competition is the final cost, boatbuilders work to the lowest price, and compromise all through the construction."
    Ian Nicholson in "Build Your Own Boat."

    So, over a builder's history, construction crews have had a lot of bad days, some new materials have turned out to be bad products, and management has had occasional bad times, some of which will be reflected in the condition of the boat a few years later when you go to buy it.

    From one end of the usage and prices scales to the other, initial cost and resale value is invariably related to engineering, workmanship, and the quality, amount, and type of material and equipment in the boat. It is ABSOLUTELY UNREALISTIC for you to expect to get an expensive boat at a cheap price, or a new boat at a used price. You may have hoped for that kind of a deal, and the seller may have encouraged that hope, but the surveyor's experience can help you avoid that trap, which is guaranteed to disappoint you sooner rather than later.

The Aging Process

    Boats are used and stored in the corrosive marine atmosphere, subject to slow but certain degradation by salt water, temperature extremes, and UV exposure. Materials such as caulk and gaskets designed to keep water out will start to shrink or lose their pliability and adhesion, letting water penetrate where it originally couldn't. Bio-degradable materials, such as plywood and balsa wood cores inside the fiberglass or used as joinery, can start to delaminate or rot from moisture penetration. Shiny, strong metals and plastics touted as "no maintenance," "corrosion resistant," or "impervious to sun or rot" will start to pit, oxidize, fade, crack, or deform. Equipment mounted aboard the boat can age deteriorate from the inside or outside of housings, mounts, hoses, tubing, etc. Even if the boat doesn't get used, its components will age deteriorate, possibly in a fashion or extent that affects the use or value of the equipment.

Usage Wear

    Boats are driven at full speed through, over, and into waves that impact their hull structures with shock loads of surprising magnitude. Solid fiberglass flexes, even when it is thick, especially in flat panels with little interior framing support. So it can show crazes in the gelcoat at "hard spots" where it flexes on either side of bulkheads and joinery that abut the hull skin. Or it may show "hinge-effect" crazes in locations where solid glass flexes relative to an adjacent cored (stiffer) sandwich such as cockpit and deck edges. Sharp corners where two or three planes of the molding meet -like the forward corners of the cabin trunk at the deck- are stress risers, and often show gelcoat crazes that cannot be permanently repaired. Then there's the accumulation of piling rash and other gouges, nicks, or dings that reflect of the use of the boat, and perhaps the skipper's skill.

    Electrical and mechanical equipment can wear out from its own normal operating cycles, and can also suffer loosened connection or chafe from engine vibrations or the pounding of the vessel underway. Finally, many plastic and rubber sheathing, insulators, or hoses deteriorate from the heat generated in the engine or generator space.

Mis-Use or Accident Failures

    Speed changes everything. High speed greatly increases the impact forces on the hull skin and frame components. I've seen sport-fishing boat towers that hold up fine on a 22-knot, single-screw boat, but break repeatedly on the 28-knot, twin-engine version of the same boat. A boat pushed beyond its intended abilities can be damaged by one-time or short-duration overloading. Even offshore quality boats can be driven to the point of failures of the laminate, or most often of attachments of the reinforcing members to the hull skin. And when a forward bulkhead or hull pan tab lets go, the stress of continued hard use progressively "un-zips" the remaining bulkheads as the flexing loads move aft.

    None but the strongest boats can withstand a prolonged grounding and pounding on a solid bottom. And the lightest boats can be considerably damaged from the slightest impact with unfriendly objects such as docks, other boats, firm bottom, stumps, or rocks. Underwater appendages including keels, running gear, and rudders are especially vulnerable to both ordinary grounding and high speed impact damage. Almost no boat will withstand the variety of severe storm effects. The survey may reveal the results of such unknown stress events.

Neglect

    Neglect is most often a case of ignoring or denying normal aging and wear or an impact adventure in a way that allows material deterioration to start and accelerate, creating some secondary damage. Boats that are superficially clean and orderly, with owners who brag about their "fussiness," often turn out to have some conditions that beg for overdue attention.

    Occasionally, a boat appears to be abandoned for the broker to sell; and while that may present an opportunity for a handy buyer, the purchase price may need to be close to salvage value in order for the resurrection to be worthwhile.

Improper Maintenance, Up-grades, or Repairs

    Inexperienced past owners may have cosmetically maintained their boat with materials or techniques, such as heavy compounding, vigorous scrubbing, or the application of caustic cleaners/removers that causes or accelerates natural deterioration. Plumbing and wiring additions are often done with "residential" grade materials and techniques that are completely inappropriate for marine applications.

    For any damage, there is a repair strategy to fit most price levels. A full, proper repair is always more expensive than a partial repair or a quickie patch job, whether it is done by an owner or a boatyard. The survey may highlight areas that were "patched, but not repaired," and have re-failed or continued to deteriorate because of the inadequacy of the work strategy and execution, regardless of its cost.