Wow how about this poor guy.
?si=YMbBCD8pGChkzxjA
Got to be so careful with new boats. I think I would definitely rather buy a second hand. Obviously there is also the Lagoon bulkhead fiasco; suspect Beneteau keel attachment as well as no doubt myriad other untold disasters.

Why single out the French?
Binks built Rising Farrster
Nexba Farr x2
Finistere out of Fremantle a couple of years ago (which still causes me personal pain)
There are plenty of others and unfortunately more to come as keel maintenance is overlooked by some.

Keels falling off are a design, construction and maintenance issue, definitely not limited to country boundaries.

In a previous life I had to assess poor infusion techniques in the MRH90 helicopter tailboom, there were a number of dry infusions across the fleet in certain sections. Even an Airbus subsidiary gets it wrong on the production line and it only gets found out years later after it passed the ultrasonic testing.
An issue with infusion moulding for low volume runs is the expense laid out by the manufacturer in cloth, consumables and labour for a 'one shot infusion', if they get it wrong there is a large expense to write off. If there is budget strain there may be an unwillingness to destroy the finished item. At best you can grind it out and repair if it is localised. I personally wouldn't buy an infused boat unless it was a race boat. Unfortunately composites hide poor workmanship.

I rewatched the video as I quickly skimmed it initially while I was waiting for kid pick up after school. I was a bit harsh above, that company does appear more shonky than most. I also have a story about a cheaply made tri that I bought from Brittany 10 yrs ago that had a ****ty ply centreboard.

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EastCoastSail said..
Why single out the French?
Binks built Rising Farrster
Nexba Farr x2
Finistere out of Fremantle a couple of years ago (which still causes me personal pain)
There are plenty of others and unfortunately more to come as keel maintenance is overlooked by some.

Keels falling off are a design, construction and maintenance issue, definitely not limited to country boundaries.

In a previous life I had to assess poor infusion techniques in the MRH90 helicopter tailboom, there were a number of dry infusions across the fleet in certain sections. Even an Airbus subsidiary gets it wrong on the production line and it only gets found out years later after it passed the ultrasonic testing.
An issue with infusion moulding for low volume runs is the expense laid out by the manufacturer in cloth, consumables and labour for a 'one shot infusion', if they get it wrong there is a large expense to write off. If there is budget strain there may be an unwillingness to destroy the finished item. At best you can grind it out and repair if it is localised. I personally wouldn't buy an infused boat unless it was a race boat. Unfortunately composites hide poor workmanship.

Yeah, it's not like any other french cat builder has misled or failed in their building process is it. Whoops, my bad, apparently they are not alone.

Awful story, to be at the end of your working life and use lots of capital to buy a boat and then lose it all to lawyers and dodgy boatbuilders would be soul destroying - a dream denied. Maybe secondhand is not so bad. There is another cat story where a Leopard 45 (I think) also had large areas of unresined voids within it's laminate. The owners got it ground out and repaired, although I think they may find it harder to sell now because any potential buyer would be wary of places that don't make a hollow sound under tapping but are not fully wet out.

In this video, about 3 minutes in, you can see a worker grinding out dry fabric areas from a brad new Leopard 45 - it is amazing to see. Makes me think that a bloke with a chopper gun is better value, let alone a bloke who is building it for himself and his family.

That's a good video. They might have vacuum bagged the repairs but they certainly rolled out the resin with parsley cutters first! The repair team were first class and I shudder to think what that cost.

Firstly as a non-directly related point but very interesting nevertheless - particularly to people interested in history or architecture - I confirmed that the factory shown (at 12:20) in my original video is in fact in the bomp proof German submarine pens built in World War two and apparently Outremer has now gone on to use these as a factory. Looks like the little canals leading into them have been concreted over. At least the Outremer factory is bomb proof :-). Maybe we should have Nazis build our boats.

Another point of interest but in the Leopard 45 video is the matrix of little holes visible at around seven minutes 15 which I think are the holes in the core which facilitate sucking the air out and hence the resin through during the vacuum bagging process. I think this is quite new technology (only relatively recently adopted by Outremer) as previously the cores were sliced about 3/4 of the way through into little squares rather like one does when turning a mango inside out and this facilitated propagation of the air and resin through the core as well as easy bending. The older technology however resulted in more resin in the core and hence more weight. Perhaps the dry patches are due to the holes being too small or blocked.

As the woman in the video says they have yet to investigate other areas apart from the bridge deck and presumably the more critical underwater areas- ouch!
Maybe they should go easy on alerting other owners before their problems are rectified and paid for otherwise they may risk Leopard avoiding liability by liquidation and re incorporation/sale as happened with the first unfortunate fellow in this string.

I think you should sell it!

Ouch!

gary

Been checking out some of their other videos, wow! nothing but troubles, had to replace an engine and the mast as well under warranty.

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julesmoto said..

Maybe they should go easy on alerting other owners before their problems are rectified and paid for otherwise they may risk Leopard avoiding liability by liquidation and re incorporation/sale as happened with the first unfortunate fellow in this string.

The Lorient ex German sub pens are an interesting place.

I did a tour of a subsidiary of an American airspace company manufacturing jumbo aircraft components . It was not infusion but pre preg and then autoclave. It was close to all finished products required reworking post ultrasonic NDI. The primary problems found were disposable gloves left in the layup followed by the workers not removing one side of the plastic of the prepreg carbon.

I was amazed to find out it was more cost effective to use untrained cheap labour to manufacture, then grind out and repair post production, sometimes areas up to several square metres in size. The problem isn't the production method but likely low trained workers with little to no supervision.

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EastCoastSail said..
The Lorient ex German sub pens are an interesting place.

I did a tour of a subsidiary of an American airspace company manufacturing jumbo aircraft components . It was not infusion but pre preg and then autoclave. It was close to all finished products required reworking post ultrasonic NDI. The primary problems found were disposable gloves left in the layup followed by the workers not removing one side of the plastic of the prepreg carbon.

I was amazed to find out it was more cost effective to use untrained cheap labour to manufacture, then grind out and repair post production, sometimes areas up to several square metres in size. The problem isn't the production method but likely low trained workers with little to no supervision.

Yeah got to do something with all those illegal African immigrants. And there's the common factor with substandard South African boats right there.
Maybe Vietnam or China is the best place to build a boat after all.

Not the workers fault, it's the management system over them that allows these outcomes.