How would they know? Any sign of damage or a lack of damage is at the bottom of the lake. Right now its a he said she said story. Would have been best for nitro to have just fixed it unless they could have proven otherwise. In that case insurance would have fixed it.

my guess is , if it had hit something hard enough for the hull to come apart, it would have left signs on whats left of the hull that a trained fiberglass repair person would have seen..Since he took it to one, and they saw no "hit" spots, they concluded it was a delamination..

Delamination of this magnitude is not damage related and not stress crack related. Anybody who has experience with this sort of thing, which is not very common, will tell you that this is definitely a manufacturers defect. Unless your insurance company covers manufacturers defects you are left to deal with the manuacturer. Sad to hear about it....hope they resolve the issue. I second the motion to drive it down to the Classic.

And before the so caled experts chime in....I am not talking about small delamination induced by stress cracking. This is by far not related to any previous damage. Hulls do not delaminate to this magnitude unless it was not allowed to cool properly at the manufacturer.

Forgive me if I read it wrong but didn't the gentlemen say he had a co-angler in the boat with him? If that is the case then the co-angler should be able to testify to whether they hit something or not, shouldn't he? I'm pretty sure they didn't launch the boat that morning that way

have you heard any knew news from BPS on this?

And yet you have another fiberglass repair shop saying that its very possible that its not manufactor defect. Always two sides to the story. Everyone is always quick to jump on the manufactor.

Look at the pics on page one if you haven't. The boat is at a fiberglass shop and in their "expert" opinions, (I would assume) they said it was clear that nothing had been hit to cause the damage. I don't know how they can tell but just saying.

Second, several keep mentioning 3 owners in 3 years. Big deal. Many pro staff boats are listed for sale before they even take delivery on them. In fact there were 2 Skeeters on this forum that way. Maybe this is the case and the boat was ran for 6 months by a pro then sold to the second guy. He ran it for 2 and a half years then sold it to Matt so he could get a new one to and keep getting the Nitro bonus money. I dunno this for a fact but seems very possible.

I find it hard to believe that Nitro wouldn't stand behind a boat that is 3 years old. I think they would have been money ahead to give you a brand new boat with a motor compared to the damage to their reputation this thread will cause. I wonder if sending KVD some of these pics would do any good?

3 owners in 3 years come on guys - is it really far fetched (have you looked at boats for sale these days) -
1st owner could have been a prostaffer - gets a new ride each year (probably made money on the sale)
2nd owner could have taken a hit like we all have in this economy and had to get out from under it.


To me a poor warranty on a hull IS a sign of an inferior product, period. If other mfg.'s can provide a much better hull warranty then they are standing behind their product with cash money (they can do this because they build a better product) and the company with the poor warranty is taking your money and going to vegas to roll the dice that you don't have an issue in the time aloted.

If it's a lemon (all mfg. have them) then the trailer bunks could have been hit at wrong angle loading it and caused a stress crack that let water in...

KVD doesn't give two grunts in the woods about this boat. He riding whatever they pay him to ride in


I can understand that it may take some form of infiltration for the water to start the delamination. But I just have a hard time seeing it doing that much damage unless there was a weak lamination

I just did quite a bitof damage to my hull and it only had damage at the impacts nothing about it tearing the bottom off

The guy I bought the boat from was selling it becuase he was about to take delivery on a new 2011 model. He upgraded to a 2011 because the 2008 was not contingency eligible any more and he had made significant money from the contingency program. He had run the boat for a couple of years.

I'll put my Mechanical Engineering hat on for a moment and offer an educated opinion on this. I have both designed and built composite aircraft structures and based on the pics there is way too much surface area involved for this to be an impact shear failure. I could be wrong but my theory is that delamination occurred and was present and that stress from both differential thermal expansion/contraction between the boat and the unsupported portion of the hull and flexing (tension or stretching) while running caused a breach. In general wholesale catastrophic composite failures occur as a result of peeling rather than tensional or compressive failure modes. Tensional stress up around the nose eg. hitting waves caused a breach. And if a breach occurred then it would be very easy for water pressure to begin the peel process. Bonded aircraft structures are checked ultrasonically for voids. Delaminations in a composite matrix usually occurs because of contamination, losing pressure during the cure cycle or simply not enough resin flow occurred to saturate the area to bond the layers of glass. It is unfortunate that you do not have the part of the boat that fell off into the lake.

I wouldn't bash Nitro in general for the chances of this is probably one in a million. Hopefully you will get a good resolution. Good luck.

yeah, what he said.

guys if this was impact related, that hull underneath the fiberglass would be bent up and show damage. Nitro's are a second class boat, and I know KVD fishes them but so what? he gets another one free when his delaminates!

We had a guy in our club buy a brand new one (granted this was 2007) and he took it out in some rough waterthe first time out. when he came in and was putting the boat away, none of the deck lids would open and you couldnt pull the front or back seats out. It was like the cap shifted back and wedged everything into the hull!