|
Beyond a LifetimeCobalt has always taken the long view. Any manufacturer can point with pride to boats in their factory wrap, but Cobalt builds boats that, with just a little love and care, will look and perform like new after a couple of decades of family occasions. Take the helm of a teenaged Cobalt. Notice the fit and finish in place after seventeen summers. Smile at the faultless reflection in the gelcoat, smooth, lustrous, its graphics still bold and distinct. Feel the deep-down luxury of the seats, supportive and supple, as intent on day long comfort as on the day of their manufacture. Cobalt boats age gracefully, age usefully because of the abiding strength of their construction No boat builder believes more than Cobalt in stainless steel and its application stem to stern. Stainless simply does not fade. It does not weaken, and so stainless steel is the structural material of choice in all Cobalt rails: rub, one-piece hand, and swim platform. Boarding ladders to latches to motorbox hinges, heavy-gauge stainless is solid and sure.
Every cast fitting that passes through the hull is solid stainless, as are all the vents and scuff plates. And naturally stainless does the job at points of high stress, at the windshield with its customer braces, for example, and in all supports for canvas. Cobalt longevity is obvious, some of the reasons why are less so. Invisible composites, hyperlight and hyperstrong, compose every Cobalt transom. No wood there, not in that all-important forcefield. No wood either in the polypropylene structural honeycomb of the floor. Nor in the all-fiberglass stringers where a methacrylate bonding compound adds lifelong permanence. No wood in the water impervious roto-cast seat bases. Cobalt pioneered the use of metal backing plates - under the seat bases, below all hardware and windshield mountings - and over time some competitors have seen the wisdom of such pervasive reinforcement. But few, if any other manufacturers embeds the backing in the fiberglass, a tradition that Cobalt has carried since it's beginning. Other Cobalt exclusives call out for individual recognition, of course. Some of them time-tested and still unique - the whispered elegance of a leathered steering wheel, for example, standard on every Cobalt built. Some of them rip-snorting and first-tried right here - say, the supersonic stepped hull on the raucous 343. So look here. Notice once more Cobalt's unprecedented melding of the hyperbolic and the day-to-day, the practical intersection of the wished-for and the entirely possible. Right here. In Neodesha. Where, again tomorrow morning, Robert Allen will arrive to do work way, way beyond any job description.
|
