Welcome to the club Nick. I think the best thing you can do is to do what you are now doing and point out the copying and let it be widely known. Other paddlers can then be aware of it and act according to their own feelings about the issue. We licensed CS Canoe in Italy to build Coasters. They put in a bigger cockpit and sold it as a recreational kayak and the advertising portrays it as not being very capable. for example: " However, given the kayaks limited size, open sea crossings are not advised." Next they cut the Coaster in two and added some straight sections in the middle to make it a little longer and called it the Korsa 15.4. They advertise it as: "Thanks to its centre of gravity biased aft and balanced volume forward, this kayak is unbeatable at surfing waves even in the hands of novices." (even though one paddler who has paddled both says the Coaster is the far superior surfing kayak). Every bit of our Coaster still looks to be their in the Korsa model, but it lacks one feature somewhat important to us, that would be....royalty payments. Now checking the website, I see they also have a Korsa 16.7 that looks to also have the entire Coaster comprising its bow and stern parts as well. They now have three versions of the Coaster itself but we haven't seen any royalty payments in years. The had the gall to contact us a while back asking to buy just a few Coaster licenses. Please don't buy any kayaks from CS Canoe and if you see any Coaster from them please check for a small white license inside and report to me what the number is (or if there was no license). Some companies just blatantly steal designs, trademarked names, and ad copy. One company used the Coaster name and refused to discontinue using it when I contacted them about it. They said they didn't mind sharing the name with us. They also said they were a small company on the other side of the country, so what was my problem. Next I see it in a Sea Kayaker review with the Coaster name attached. The company appears to now be defunct. I was hoping they would do real well with the kayak because then they might have been worth suing. Many Paddlewisers already know the story of the Nadgee Explorer in Australia and how the plans for it came from the Sea Kayaker review lines drawing of the Mariner Max. Seaward Kayaks knocked off the Arluk II and called it the Ascente, knocked off the Seda Tango and called it the Southwind, and knocked off Southwind Kayaks' (a southern California kayak store) palm tree logo for their name decal for that kayak. At one point I thought I recognized a bunch of Seaward's ad copy as something I'd seen before in a Canoe and Kayak magazine. Sure enough, once I found it, I called the magazine and asked if they had given permission for its use, they hadn't. I suspect their are many more rip-offs involving Seaward Kayaks but I just don't know about them. As a result, I refused to buy anything from that company for our store that I might have otherwise purchased from them. Nick, your Website says: "So, I'm going with some deck lines. I'll have a basic shock cord system in front of the cockpit and some more around the hatches. I want to keep these as low profile as possible. The system I've determined to have the least visual impact is a simple hole through the boat with shock cord pulled through the hole. If you make a 1/4" hole and pull through a 5/16" shock cord, the cord will pretty much seal up the hole with maybe a little water wicking through the braided jacket of the cord." We have been doing that since 1980 for the chart lines (so the paddler can't bark his knuckles on a fitting there) and never saw it done that way before we did it. Note: with the right size hole through the deck you won't get any leaking at all. Were you aware we were doing it that way? Did you see it somewhere else (I haven't). So, where's the attribution on your website for the idea? ;-) In our FAQ's you will find detailed directions for how to restring the shock cord for our customers who need to replace it. If you haven't seen it already the tips in our FAQ might help you get the shock cord through an even smaller hole to ensure a good seal. *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List - Any opinions or suggestions expressed here are solely those of the writer(s). You must assume the entire responsibility for reliance upon them. All postings copyright the author. Submissions: PaddleWise_at_PaddleWise.net Subscriptions: PaddleWise-request_at_PaddleWise.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************Received on Fri Jul 01 2011 - 02:29:29 PDT
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.4.0 : Thu Aug 21 2025 - 16:31:45 PDT