Regarding Broken Idasailor Rudders
Regarding the post about a broken Idasailor rudder, I wrote the company inquiring as to their warranty policy and any problems with the H260 rudders. The following is the response I received from the company and, in my opinion, speaks very highly, not only of the rudder, but the company and people that stand behind it: Hi Bob, Thanks for pointing that out to me, much appreciated. To make a long story short, the particular owner who is being negative about our rudder is bent out of shape because I refused to pay his tow bill in from the gulf stream when his rudder broke. I replaced the broken rudder immediately under warranty, but he felt strongly that IdaSailor was liable for his tow bill. When I would not agree to pay, he then contacted sailboatowners.com who he bought the rudder from and demanded that they pay it. They also refused. Here's the whole story, as I related it to one of the owner's group who inquired as to what actually happened: Hello All, several owners have contacted me off list and wanted me to weigh in on the subject of a recent blade failure on a Hunter 260 in the Gulf Stream. Here is what happened as I understand it and what we did to respond: Our customer with a Hunter 260 sails to the Bahamas without incident. On the way back, while crossing the Gulf Stream under motor, he is humming along when suddenly he hears a sharp crack and his rudder fails just below the rudderhead, which is the highest load area of the blade. He reported the conditions to me as being calm (for the Gulf Stream). Now, motoring in calm conditions does not put much load on a rudder, so obviously either there was more to the story or the failure was a genuine fluke from internally flawed material that we could not have predicted or tested for. The Hunter 260 rudder has consistently been a popular part and we have 200+ blades in the water right now, this was the first failure of that model reported to us. The customer called us from Florida after they were towed in, we got the call in the morning, around 11 am Mountain time. They told me they were stuck without the rudder and would we replace it under warranty? "Of course" we said, we immediately put a new blade for them in front of all other orders, revisited our design to make sure there was not a design flaw that could have caused the failure and made a couple small revisions, not because we saw a problem, but because we want to build the best rudders we can. Within 5 hours we had a new blade with the "just in case" improvements completely finished and we shipped it via Fedex priority overnight it to the customer's marina in Florida, shipping cost me close to $200 (the blade originally cost the customer $389). Customer received the blade the next morning, less than 24 hours after the failure was reported to us. I also enclosed a return Fedex shipping label for the broken blade so that the customer could simply put the old one the same box and give it back to the Fedex guy without cost to them or inconvenience. When the first blade was returned to us, the upper part was missing, making it difficult to determine what actually caused the failure, we did analyze the lower part, but it appears that the blade was just heavily, heavily overloaded, the material showed no intrinsic flaws, but without the upper portion it was impossible to come to any solid conclusions. Now, I don't know about you, but I can't think of any faster, better way to handle a warranty issue. Until recently, I was unaware that a few days later this customer then went on to run his boat into a bridge. I don't follow what the rudder failure and subsequent replacement had to do with him breaking his mast and smashing his outboard on the seawall some days later, but perhaps the our owner in question can clarify that for us all. Next, the Hunter 260 customer called the day that they received the rudder to thank us for our fast service and to let us know how much they appreciated us standing behind our product. At this point I believe problem to be solved. Two weeks later, the same customer calls me to tell me that he no longer trusts our rudder after the failure and proceeds to hint that I should pay for his tow bill. I replied that I had handled the product failure in the best way that I could, that I was sorry that the rudder blade had broken, but that my liability was limited to replacing the rudder in a timely fashion and that there was no reason to distrust the new rudder blade. I mentioned that if his outboard had quit in the middle of the Gulf Stream, Evinrude was unlikely to pay his tow bill, likewise if his steering pedestal had failed, Edson would not have paid his tow bill either. His tow bill was reported to me as $671. After I did not agree to pay for the tow bill, he then called Sailboatowners.com (one of our parts dealers, whom he had purchased the blade from) and tried to get them to pay it, they also refused to the best of my knowledge and I don't think that is unreasonable. I suggest he look into towing insurance in the future, I have a Boat US membership and I'm 1000 miles from the nearest Boat US towing service, but I'm covered anyway. I believe that Sailing is an inherently risky activity and while sailing, many, many bad things can happen, including broken parts that can cause inconvenience, discomfort and endanger the safety of the sailors involved. Sailors who don't believe or understand this should look at their sport/hobby/pastime in a different way. Further, it does not matter how carefully we build things, overwhelming loads, carelessness, bad weather, bad luck, etc., will generally conspire to break stuff occasionally. IdaSailor is not having an epidemic of broken rudders, we have had rudder blades break and we replace them cheerfully and in a timely fashion. Our company has grown and right now we sell and build about $50,000 worth of rudders and tillers a month. With that many parts being sold, some can and do fail. Our failure percentage right now is one third of 1% across the board for all products, according to my tracking which is pretty thorough and takes into account the early two-piece Mac blades we built and ended up replacing virtually all of them. All this to say, like any product, fiberglass, hdpe or other, ours can in fact be broken. We stand behind our stuff with the best warranty in the sailboat industry and will continue to do so. We also work very hard every day to keep our prices down and provide tremendous value for our customers, even in the face of rapidly escalating materials costs. Thanks for indulging me and thanks very much for all the support and patronage, much appreciated. Fair Winds, -Joel Joel Santarone General Manager IdaSailor Marine www.idasailor.com 208-375-2204 Shop 866-400-2204 toll free Bob, I hope this helps. Since I posted the response above, the customer has never contacted me again but continues to spread fears of broken rudder blades to anyone who will listen. You will notice in the same thread on hunterowners.com that an owner mentions that he broke three of the original equipment hunter rudders. We have had a total of two H260 rudders fail, out of about 200 sold. Let me know if you have any other questions about this, the internet makes the world a very small place and I depend on our reputation to stay in business. Feel free to use any or all of the above to post to the list. Fair winds, -Joel
