Nautiqueskins.com retraction

[Chexi]

I may be flamed profusely for this, but since I was formerly a big supporter of Nautiqueskins.com, and because viewers may read my prior recommendation and decide to go with Nautiqueskins.com, I am obligated to post a retraction of my previous recommendation. Please read on, because I am not saying their work is awful, I am only saying that it is not quite good enough for my very high standards.

If you are going to replace your vinyl or have your vinyl replaced on your older Nautique and must have legal Correct Craft logos, you may have no other options than to work through Nautiqueskins.com. If such is the case, you will get helpful people (if you are installing them yourself), you will get factory colors, and you will get the authentic logos.

What you may not get (cannot speak for everyone, just my own experience), is all the vinyl pieces shipped to you the first, or second time, the right vinyl pieces shipped to you the first or second time, perfect stitching, seams that are straight and line up, color panels that line up, or sew foam on all the pieces that your factory vinyl had. For me these problems were not on every piece, but there were enough of them for me to consider significant. If you are a patient person and can deal with these sorts of problems, you can rest assured that Nautiqueskins will try to work with you to make it right. Missing or wrong color hidem and welt is easily addressed and they will send you what was missing or wrong quickly. Improper stitching can be a different matter. It requires you to ship the bad piece back to them to try to fix. If you send back the piece, they will try to fix it, but you will pay for shipping (to them, not back to you) and you should not expect perfection with what is returned to you. It will likely be better than it was, but probably not perfect (or as good as factory). For example, the logo areas on both my stern back rest and bow backrests were crooked, and the nose of the bow backrest had significant stitching errors with the color panels not lining up. The stern backrest came back pretty close to perfect. The bow piece, better, but still noticeably not perfect to a casual observer.

Finally, to try to balance this, they really did try to fix things and went above and beyond for some things (like actually installing the vinyl on my walk-throughs after I sent them in because they had carpet on them, which they did not anticipate and did not ship the proper vinyl to me). However, my order simply had too many mistakes (most of them addressed adequately, some quickly... some not so quickly, with the bow backrest being the significant exception) for me to continue to recommend their work. I give them a "B" for the product itself, a "D" for their order fulfillment, and an "A-" for their service after sale. This will probably be good enough for most people, and perhaps my experience was atypical, but I can only opine on my own experience, and a vendor must do "A" work across the board to get my recommendation.

BTW, anyone who is planning on re-skinning their bow backrest... good luck. It is a nightmare and you will need more hands than you alone possess.

[DavidF]

RE: Nautiqueskins.com retraction

Ouch. Man, I am sorry you ended up having a bad experience. As having just finished replacing my entire interior from Nautiqueskins, I can say that my experience was much better (I guess). Was the order perfect the first time? No. Was the order absolutely perfect? NO. Did George and Christine work with me? Absolutely yes.

What I believe is that we are asking someone to send us skins without evening laying eyes on our boats. Then we must fit the skins to the pieces and hope they fit and work properly. In the factory, they probably just make new pieces if their are problems and noone ever knows any different.

My interior turned out great and I am very pleased. The person I bought the boat from was amazed and wished he knew of Nautiqueskins years ago.

And, yes the bow backrest was diffilcult, but very doable. The key to all the pieces is to put reference lines on the new pieces that match the old. This way, you are not over or under stretching the skin. Also, my pieces also did not have sew foam in places that where the factory had it, but in the end, it made no difference in feel or look. I cannot find any fault in make these type of changes to save a few dollars which I would assume are passed onto the customer.

As far as colors lining up, my replacement skins were better than factory at the observers seat, could not ask for anything more.

Chexi: Sorry for your troubles and I hope everything turned out good in the end. I think you are a lot like me and a perfectionist. We expect the very best and can be critical if we don't get it...this is the main reason I do things myself as I do not believe others with do it as well or care as much as I do. Cheers.

[Chexi]

My understanding is that they have all the old patterns, so it should not be any more difficult for them than it was for the original upholsterers. I started my project when I think you were about 1/3 of the way through yours. I am still not finished, partly due to my own schedule, but mostly due to the problems with shipping the wrong items and errors in the pieces sent.

Here is what I am stuck on now. This has already been sent back once.

I measured the difference on my factory skins and it was 1/4" off. This is over an inch off. If I were to actually accept this and finish installing it, the entire right side of the bow vinyl would look high, with too much gray and not enough white on the right. The blue stripe ends up being higher on the right. This should have been caught before it was sent out. It then should have been fixed or redone after being sent back the first time. In their defense, I sent it back for a different reason (the nose was screwed up), but they did not really adequately fix that part either. Now I have a minimum of another 3-4 weeks without a bow backrest in my boat. Entirely unacceptable.

[2gofaster]

****! That's pretty far off! That sucks to hear.

[AuMDLST]

So, you are looking for someone to recreate (by hand in 2009) a hand made item from 199? ???

I would say that is an impossible standard - I can show you several instances of "imperfections"
in the vinyl work on factory delivered (hand made) Nautiques.

Looks to me that the vinyl should have been stretched / pulled down more in the bow area.

[Chexi]

Nice. I predicted I would get flamed, and I guess your comment is the first.

1. Yes, I absolutely expect them to get it right. Nautiqueskins.com has the patterns! This is not just some custom upholstery shop. They have the exclusive rights to do older Nautiques (over 5 years from current I believe). That is why they can do the embroidery legally. They supply many of the dealers. Again... they have the patterns! And this bow piece is the same piece from every 99 Air, Sport and Super Sport. They have done this piece many, many times.

2. This is the 2nd to last piece on an entire re-skin job. I have installed all the other pieces myself, and while I was an amateur when I started, by now I know what I am doing. Your insinuation otherwise is frankly not worth my time. However, since you appear to be an expert, I would prefer to not have to remove any more staples and stick with what I have, so please tell me how you would stretch a 1" piece of vinyl to 2" without (a) tearing the vinyl, (b) pulling the adjacent French seam apart or (c) moving the French seam off the foam edge? I worked on this in the Texas sun at 100 degrees Farenheit. Perhaps in Australia vinyl stretches 80% more than it does here in Texas in July. I know that parts of Australia get hotter than Texas, but I do not think anyone is reskinning Nautiques in the middle of the outback.

3. There were many other small imperfections that I have not mentioned. There were also many small imperfections in the factory skins that I removed. That is part of the handmade process. That is precisely why I did not and am not harping about them, and why I continued to recommend Nautiqueskins.com for a while even after spotting those imperfections. Those were within the tolerances of reason. However, a 100% margin of error is not within a reasonable tolerance. This is enough of an error that one does not have to look for it to spot it. It jumps out at you.

[Chexi]

BTW, David you have been a big help to me with this project and other Nautique knowledge. I am glad your experience was better than mine. To set the record straight, the rest of my boat is looking very nice. I had to re-do several pieces to get them good enough for my standards, but they are not perfect. I would say that I am a "near" perfectionist. I expect people to do the best job they are capable of. When I installed the skins and did not do my best job, I took them off and re-did them. All my stern seat bottoms were done and then re-done because I was not satisfied with them the first time. The job done on my order was not the best job they were capable of (I sure hope not anyway) and they have admitted as much.

Regarding the sew foam, the biggest thing I find when it is missing is that stapling into fiberglass becomes more difficult. The sew foam seems to help against tearing the vinyl and also adds a little depth to the piece so the staple does not have to go in quite as far. I also find that aesthetically it is noticeable when you have sew foam on one side of piping and not on the other (in my case on my observer seat). There is definitely a noticeable difference in depth or the appearance of the thickness of the vinyl, but one has to look for it to notice.

[Chexi]

Nice. I predicted I would get flamed, and I guess your comment is the first.

1. Yes, I absolutely expect them to get it right. Nautiqueskins.com has the patterns! This is not just some custom upholstery shop. They have the exclusive rights to do older Nautiques (over 5 years from current I believe). That is why they can do the embroidery legally. They supply many of the dealers. Again... they have the patterns! And this bow piece is the same piece from every 99 Air, Sport and Super Sport. They have done this piece many, many times.

2. This is the 2nd to last piece on an entire re-skin job. I have installed all the other pieces myself, and while I was an amateur when I started, by now I know what I am doing. Your insinuation otherwise is frankly not worth my time. However, since you appear to be an expert, I would prefer to not have to remove any more staples and stick with what I have, so please tell me how you would stretch a 1" piece of vinyl to 2" without (a) tearing the vinyl, (b) pulling the adjacent French seam apart or (c) moving the French seam off the foam edge? I worked on this in the Texas sun at 100 degrees Farenheit. Perhaps in Australia vinyl stretches 80% more than it does here in Texas in July. I know that parts of Australia get hotter than Texas, but I do not think anyone is reskinning Nautiques in the middle of the outback.

3. There were many other small imperfections that I have not mentioned. There were also many small imperfections in the factory skins that I removed. That is part of the handmade process. That is precisely why I did not and am not harping about them, and why I continued to recommend Nautiqueskins.com for a while even after spotting those imperfections. Those were within the tolerances of reason. However, a 100% margin of error is not within a reasonable tolerance. This is enough of an error that one does not have to look for it to spot it. It jumps out at you.

Correction, I thought you were in Australia due to your name, but apparently not. This does not change the rest of my comment or my question.

[bchesley]

I understand your frustration as that panel is definately off by a large margin.

That being said I too had a great experience with nautiqueskins.com. All of my panels were perfectly straight and they fit exactly like the original ones. Now I did have them installed by a buddy who has installed probably over a 100 skins on every year nautique boat there is. He said that they were as good as the factory puts out. Maybe the work load that they have taken on has them using some less than experienced workers? Not sure as this is the first time I had heard anything negative about them.

[Chexi]

Brad, can you ask your friend what he would charge to install the bow backrest piece? We are not that far away, and I am frustrated enough to hire someone to do it at this point. I could bring it to him/her.

[east tx skier]

If Brad's friend is who I think it is, I can vouch for his work as well.

[bchesley]

Call Ski N Sports and ask for Shannon. Tell him that I sent you there. 903-509-1ski.

[lionel]

I did not have luck with them either. I wanted them to make a seat pictured in the top left of their websites homepage. After trying to contact them several times, they finally got back to me and said they couldn't do it? Ummm, OK? I took my business elsewhere.

[DavidF]

Chexi:

Make trip on down to Austin and I will help you install the bow backrest. Yes, it was a challenge. I did mine by:
1. Marked the new skin with reference marks (using pencil). I measured the original skin where it contacted the edge of the fiberglass. This helps me keep the seam straight and ensures I do not over stretch.
2. I stapled the nose in place first.
3. I then stapled the upper corners on both sides of the pass-thru (ends).
4. Working from bow to stern, i stretched to the stern as I stapled.
5. Last, I pulled the 90 degree curved portion last.

All the while, I would turn the piece over to staple the bottom side. Occassionly, I would pull staples and readjust. In the end, the bottom side needs to be left as loose as possible (but without wrinkles) so that the backrest does ride to high above the seat cushions.

I hope you get your problems worked out eventually. Good luck.

[Chexi]

I have been reminded of a few items of note that in fairness I need to post to further temper and in some cases correct or further "retract" my above "retraction" if you will.

1. Nautiqueskins.com has never stated that they have the exclusive rights to legally apply the Correct Craft and Nautique logos. I was told this by someone on CCFan.com about 6 months before I placed my order with them. Apparently this is not true. There must be other upholstery shops that have these rights or that can pay a royalty to embroider these logos. I do not know the details of which shops or how the royalty process works. All I do know is that Nautiqueskins.com has never claimed to have the exclusive rights to do so.

2. Regarding the sew foam, apparently there is no consistency at the factory on the original skins regarding which pieces get sew foam and which do not. The difference in look is minimal, but I do find staples to go in better with sew foam on. That said, not having sew foam on a particular piece is not a defect or shoddy workmanship.

3. My comment about having to pay shipping to return a bad piece was not correct. My memory failed me on that one. I did in fact pay that shipping, but I offered to do so as I also sent the walk-throughs in which Nautiqueskins went above and beyond on to actually do the install for me free of charge. I do not mean to create an expectation that they will install items free of charge generally (they may, but I do not think it fair to expect so), but they did go above and beyond on this one.

4. On the first rear seat bottom that I installed, I ended up not being happy with the look. The foam had compressed too much over time. I undid it and added some Dacron to give it some additional size. When I did this, I could not get one of the corners correct (the seam was coming apart). I told Nautiqueskins that I would need to buy another seat bottom and was prepared to do so because it was my mistake. They suggested that I send it in and let them look at it to see if they could fix it. They did. They could have simply made more money selling me another piece, but they went above and beyond and fixed the one I sent in without charging me for their labor.

5. Nautiqueskins does recommend that you have a professional install your skins. That said, they know that some of us are either too cheap to hire someone to do it (my words not theirs) or like to do things ourselves. I probably fall a little into both camps. At any rate, they always answered my installation questions promptly.

It was items like 3, 4 and 5 above and the general good quality of their product and willingness to help that caused me to recommend them so highly in the past. It was not until I had turned to the stern backrest and the bow backrest that I really had any problem with the quality of the product itself. Up until then it had only been some missing hidem or wrong color hidem, which they promptly corrected. The stern backrest had a crooked CC logo, which they corrected to my satisfaction after I sent that in. The bow backrest was not corrected to my satisfaction. As such, the only continuing issue that has yet to be resolved is the bow backrest.

I intend to post pictures of the boat and the vinyl install and you can be the judge (to the extent you can tell in pictures) as to the quality of the materials and the quality of the install. Personally, I (and the others who have seen it in person) think everything looks great except the one piece.