Made in America

The quality of American manufactured products became nearly a joke in the seventies and eighties, until Lee Iacocca and the Chrysler Corporation symbolically, and in actual fact, led a quality turnaround that continues until this day. But "Made in America" can still give one pause, particularly with products that are manufactured in the "heartland", a long way from the coasts where companies have been bludgeoned into quality and reliability consciousness by superb Japanese and German products. Heartland like Wisconsin.

It is perhaps with years of accumulated frustration that I have with "crappy" American products, and with the underlying indifference of many of our workers to this day, that I reacted strongly to what was a simple problem with our Carver yacht: the built-in seat in the forward shower "hobby-horsed." This is difficult to explain in words, but let me try.

The modular fiberglass shower compartment, with a footprint of about 2'x 3', has a platform molded into about a third of its square footage, designed to support a seat. The actual seat, about 12" x 24", is cut out of 1" milky-white "Starboard" – a well-known marine building material (In the photo, you can just see the seat, in place, resting on the molded-in platform).

To make the bottom of the seat conform to the molded-in platform, three bottom edges – forward, aft, and outboard – have to be chamfered back about 1/2" along their entire perimeter, to accommodate the radiused joints (i.e., fillets) where the horizontal platform meets the three vertical sides of the shower module. The sides and bottom of the seat inset are then coated with caulking compound, and it is secured to the platform with concealed stainless steel wood screws.

At least, that's the theory. Somewhere in Wisconsin, there is a boatworker who was too lazy, too indifferent, or too incompetent to prep this seat correctly for installation. We discovered this indirectly. For several months after the yacht was pressed into service as our Southern California office and overnight lodging, we increasingly noticed a foul smell emanating from the shower area. Suspecting first the head or holding tank, and then the gray water sump tank, we finally noticed that if one pressed downward on the inboard edge of the shower seat, the outboard edge popped up, breaking the caulk seal, and lifting away from from the side of the shower nearly 1/2 inch. Similarly, pushing the outboard edge downward resulted in the inboard edge lifting up as much. Carver had given us a little see-saw.

Upon removing the screws holding the seat in place, I discovered a thick accumulation of 10 months of sludge, hair, soap, and bacteria under most of the seat, particularly at the edges. There was the smell. I also noted that the bottom edges of the seat were only chamfered part way – from the inboard bullnose halfway to the hull. The point where the chamfer ended, where the bottom edge profile of the seat changed to a right angle, then rested on the filleted edges of the platform, and prevented the seat from fitting flush to that platform, and all the way around. Finally, I noticed that in an attempt to keep the seat from see-sawing, an extra long screw – different from the other three – was added in an attempt to hold the seat secure by bending the 1"-thick plastic downward under extreme pressure.

You can just picture it. Some boatworker, whose job it was to fit the seat into place either chamfered it himself insufficiently, or received it from the cabinet shop that way. Rather than stopping, carrying it to a routing table, and finishing it correctly, having discovered the extremely poor fit, he (or she), after a brief "what the Hell", grabbed a longer screw, and torqued away. The sin was hidden until everything began working loose, due to natural torque in a boat, and the unnatural torque of the spring-loaded seat.

I chamfered the seat bottom along all three bottom inside edges, then used expanding foam to fill the chamfer chambers, and 3M 5200 on the bottom and perimeter. Four identical screws, and moderate torque, were all that was required to reinstall. I also chamfered the three top edges about 1/8 inch, to hold a bead of caulk.

That was three years ago. There is to this day, no hair, no sludge, and no bacteria under this seat, and the entire caulked seal remains pristine.

Carver reimbursed us at the time for the labor and materials, for which I thank them. But for their indifferent worker, who reminded me once again what "Made in America" means to much of the world, I give them an "D". They should be ashamed; I am.