Disappointed in Tracker’s welding

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SeaFaring

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I was buying fishing line today and spun past the trackers for sale. I get that MIG welding sheet metal is hard, but they really struggled in some of the corners.

No reason to believe the welds were unsound, just ugly.

Proof they can do a decent looking weld:

65d48caaa73ffb7485259d995b8dbf64.jpg


But not consistently (same boat, adjacent weld - they really chewed up the base metal):

e16546c773f952ea398f6e12a104e3e0.jpg


A lot of the boats (I looked at about a dozen) had issues like this. It was just easier to photograph on the unpainted one.

And that weird waviness was NOT where a bottom strake met the prow. It was just uneven.


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LDUBS said:
Oh boy, that does look bad. On the second photo a little less than half way from the left, it looks like there is gap. I'm far from an expert but that can't be good.

Wow. I missed that void looking in person. Sheesh. Now imagine if it were painted...


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I've been shopping for a big water trolling boat, and I am partial to aluminum boats, so I looked at the Tracker Targas and such. I can't believe the quality that company expects you to deem acceptable for a $35,000 boat. Now it should be noted that a comparable Lund or even Starcraft would be 20-30% more money, but still, if you are spending real money it better have some attention to detail. The welds are only part of it. I saw cross beams that were telegraphing their outline through the hull. It looked terrible.
 
If your buying a new boat regardless of what you spend I’d expect it to have no holes in it. If the weld is split there where it is easy to reach, imagine what they might look like under the boat or where you can’t see them under flooring.


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20294051_206626296535549_5519035010956890192_n.jpgQuit honestly that flat weld on the top is passable but far from great. It should look like this. I have a Grizzly here and the welding down one side looks like a welder did it, the other side looks like a pigeon set on it with diarrhea. Thus I have had to go back and clean off the paint and reweld just about every weld on that side and repaint it where they have broken.
 
Agreed - I only meant passable, not beautiful or aspirational.

Your example is much nicer.


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No way I'd ever accept that on delivery from a company. It looks like they had a novice learning that day how to weld. If your going to do that at least hide it where it won't be seen. How does a shop even let that get past quality inspection? Someone needs to be fired.
 
Crazyboat said:
No way I'd ever accept that on delivery from a company. It looks like they had a novice learning that day how to weld. If your going to do that at least hide it where it won't be seen. How does a shop even let that get past quality inspection? Someone needs to be fired.

A majority of the boats that I looked at on the lot (most of them except for the stacked Jon boats) had issues like this to a greater or lesser extent. The only one where I didn’t find anything sub-par was a 20’ Targa that had most of the seams covered by trim.

With the painted boats it was hard to tell how bad it really was.

Maybe they were just having a bad month at the factory, but this wasn’t isolated.


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That's unacceptable even for an entry level boat. I don't even want to think what they're covering up with paint.
Tracker has always been notorious for QC problems. I wonder what's going to happen with Ranger now that Tracker owns them. Bean counters don't care about quality.
 
The bean counters will be OK with it as long as they can charge a premium that exceeds the extra cost.

Hopefully they bought Ranger to have a brand that moves them higher up the food chain and won’t mess with it.


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SeaFaring said:
The bean counters will be OK with it as long as they can charge a premium that exceeds the extra cost.

Hopefully they bought Ranger to have a brand that moves them higher up the food chain and won’t mess with it.


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We can hope for that but when a company is taken over, it usually goes to the next lowest denominator. They will say in the press releases that it's to buy more equipment and purchase better quality material. Sometimes it takes a while for the corner cutting to show up. We'll have to wait and see how it rolls out but Tracker is known for leaving no corner uncut. I'm just happy I bought my Seaark when I did. I was given a factory tour before I bought mine and was pretty impressed with their construction practices.
BTW, looking at he OP's photos, deck cleats which are intended to secure your boat in rough conditions and are installed using pop rivets would not instill confidence in me if I were a potential buyer. I guess that in very protected waters you would probably be OK.
 
Good gracious. I was so caught up in the welding that I didn’t even notice pop riveted cleats.


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I'm a guitar player and firearm enthusiast and I see this type of workmanship degradation on those and other products too. When foreign competition starts taking their market share away, they clean up the quality, then after years of an uplift in workmanship they invariably
slide back into shoddy build practices or worse change materials to something that do not require the same amount labor or level of experienced craftsmen.

It's not only the corporate boards, and lower level bean counters insisting on throughput and production goals, it's workers and inspectors not wanting to make noise.
 
I'm in the south US and looked at a bunch of metal hulls a few months ago, including those in this post. Finally settled on a used one, but overall, the only one I saw that held a candle in weld quality to northwest metal boats is the Alweld.

I have had three Kofflers and a Hyde. There are plenty of high quality offerings from out west. Used to cost $650 to ship my last one, it's up to double that now. But what a difference in material and quality of construction!

I bought a new "high end" 18/72 modvee jon a few years back, what a junker. Broke five poorly fabricated rib welds the second day on the water and the factory blew it off, won't use the brand name in this post, dealer quit them too.
 
I woulda guessed boats were machine welded by now. A dealer in town used to sell Tracker boats where we liked to loiter. The one time I could afford to think about a new one they cornered me in an office and said it had a special discount for that day only which I learned later is just a sales tactic. Lucky for me i made it out of there. Now all they have in the showroom are ginormous pleasure boats or ski boats or whatever you call em. I call em boats for people with money to burn.
 
water bouy said:
I woulda guessed boats were machine welded by now. A dealer in town used to sell Tracker boats where we liked to loiter. The one time I could afford to think about a new one they cornered me in an office and said it had a special discount for that day only which I learned later is just a sales tactic. Lucky for me i made it out of there. Now all they have in the showroom are ginormous pleasure boats or ski boats or whatever you call em. I call em boats for people with money to burn.

Seaarks are not machine welded. When I toured their facility, there were two welders, one was tacking it all together and the other guy welded it out.
The only thing automatic was the CNC plasma cutter. They literally build them one at a time. At least it was that way before Correct Craft bought them out. Don't know how it's done now, hopefully the same way.
 
Tracker pays relatively low wages and benefits and have sort of a revolving door. Its not known as a good place to work hence the multiple attempts at Unionization that Johnny beats back every time. you have a few lifers he takes care of and then the rest. so with the turnover you have inexperienced people building the boats and doing more sensitive work like welding what gets me is how does that pass quality inspection?
 
gnappi said:
I'm a guitar player and firearm enthusiast and I see this type of workmanship degradation on those and other products too. When foreign competition starts taking their market share away, they clean up the quality, then after years of an uplift in workmanship they invariably
slide back into shoddy build practices or worse change materials to something that do not require the same amount labor or level of experienced craftsmen.

It's not only the corporate boards, and lower level bean counters insisting on throughput and production goals, it's workers and inspectors not wanting to make noise.

I agree I seem like a guy can build a great product and fast forward something happens and then name is sold and it turns to inferior quality. I know there are a lot of reasons this can happen and if we started a list of such it would go for pages.

I'm 68 and you guy know what I mean, the younger guy don't know any better, anyway it gets me.
 

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