SailsTech Tunisia - horror story

[barrymac]

I'll keep this brief, but I feel that it's necessary as a service to other sailors and due to safety implications of defective work. This supplier should be avoided. They aren't even cheap, if you thought that might justify the risk.

I would be happy to share more details and photos if requested.

In short I took a chance on this company for a new set of sails. They are stitchers working from CAD models using imported materials. Unfortunately they are better at stitching up their customers than sails. So the major errors they made are roughly as follows:

• Losing bearings in halyard cars
• Not stamping eyelets with enough pressure
• making the sail the wrong size
• not completing the replacement of new batten holders

The Zspar system on this vessel needs some care to remove the main sail from the cars, which hold loose bearings. It's easy enough to make the mistake if you've never seen one before, although pretty obvious. It's also pretty easy to tell you're customer if that happened so they can fix it and don't destroy a car in heavy weather.

When the eyelets are not stamped properly then a sharp edge is present. On this rig, it will cut through reef lines. I found this flaw the hard way, with a bang in heavy weather.

The sail was made too long despite them taking measurements twice, and having access to the sail plan documentation of the boat.

The batten brackets were the first sign that these guys were jokers. They told me they lost half of them, and so they delivered the sail with half of the batten holders from the old sail. They said they had the new ones on order and would be with me within a week. Weeks of chasing ensued, and eventually they came with a plastic bag full of parts that were only a half attempt at a local fabrication copy. Several of the stub screws were missing from the batten tensioners in the whole set.

The whole process of getting these sails made took months, after an initial estimate of two weeks, which was obviously pretty over optimistic, They never made any reparations for the flaws I pointed out. Their attitude was simply, well we've got the money now so we couldn't care less. They started with lies and denials of anything being wrong, and eventually just ignored all communications when presented with photographs of the issues.

https://www.sails-tech.com/

Watch out!