I bought a Slipper on Criagslist earlier this summer. Fiberglass, ash gun wales; beautiful boat and a lot of fun to paddle.
I finally got around to putting new tags on the boat last week and the DMV/ DNR ran the serial number and it came up as a 1968 Fiberglass Mad River.
Multiple things wrong with this…
- MR vintages for the slipper, in fiberglass, run 83-85 (as the Lady Slipper) and 86-95 as the Slipper.
- The Malecite didn’t drop until '74.
- SN makes it look like an '87 as far as I can tell…
To make things even weirder I asked the guy I bought the boat from when he bought it and he said in the early 70s.
I emailed MR to ask for their help but thought I’d ask this group for thoughts/ ideas as well. It’s possible numbers just got fat fingered during the data entry with the DNR I suppose, and that’s likely the correct answer. Nonetheless, seems interesting to me…wonder if anyone else has ever had something similar?
SN: MADJX7331687
Well
Mad River Canoe was not making boats in 1968 so you can forget that.
The first three characters of the HIN are the manufacturer’s identification code (MIC) which I am sure you already know. MAD is the MIC for Mad River Canoe, so far so good.
The next 5 characters of the HIN could be used by manufacturers any way they wished. I recall from a prior thread on this forum that JX is a model code for the Slipper, so that fits. The next three digits would be some sort of serial production number.
The last four characters of the HIN were typically used to indicate the month and year of production and the model year. The production year was often the same as the model year but not infrequently preceded the model year by one year.
Are you sure that the 1 character is not in fact the alpha character I? If so, the last four digits of the HIN would indicate that the boat was certified (built) in September of 1986 for the 1987 model year, the year it was likely sold.
Correct…
The 1 is indeed an I.
My guess is the initial registration fat fingered from '86 to '68. I knew the '68 marker in the system had to be erroneous…
If nothing else it’s interesting and was a fun little project to research with a few beers.
A really fun little boat too, I’ve had a lot of fun playing around with it this summer on various lakes and rivers. Previous owner had it handing in his garage for the better part of 25 years; boat hadn’t seen water in a long time.