Epic 18X Sport/Performace

About the quality problems…
I just read something interesting, but unfortunately I don’t have the link to the article. Here’s a bit of what I saved-



“Rumours have been circulating in the surfski paddling community for some time that Epic Kayaks was shutting down its operations in SA and moving production to another country.



As an interested party (V10 owner) I thought I’d approach Oscar Chalupsky and get the information first hand. Oscar was as communicative as ever and this is what I learned.



Production of Epic products is indeed moving abroad and production at the Durban factory has in fact already ceased. According to Oscar the move was motivated by difficulties in achieving consistent product quality and a need to scale up production capacity dramatically.”



SA is South Africa. Do you know how recent the boat with questionable quality was built, or where it was built? I’m definitely interested in checking some of their boats out down the road, but the quality issues would be a major deterrent.

My China-built glass V10
has been quite good overall. Layup is very nice and I’ve had no issues with hull integrity. As delivered, it was poorly sealed around the cockpit drain, rudder cables, and rudder stock and leaked way more than it should, but Epic took care of having a good local shop make it right and it’s been trouble-free since then (a year or so). It came out of one of the first few containers out of China, so I’d be inclined to write the sealing glitches off to growing pains over there. I have heard that the Ultras need to be handled with care, but a lot of guys are very happy with theirs.