MacGregorSailors.com

Does anyone with an iron keel Mac or Venture know the actual weight of their boat? The brochure for the 25 says 2100lbs. That always seemed pretty light. Interestingly I noticed the v24 brochure also lists exactly 2100 lbs, even though it’s a few inches shorter and has 50lbs less ballast.

So I decided to try to weight my boat. It’s on the trailer, blocked up, and the boat is basically empty. I used the lever arm and scale method with a heavy pipe and a shop crane to get below the 650 lb max of my scale. So with a 3 ft pipe, blocked at 0, trailer frame at 1, and crane/scale/rope at 3, I got 620 lbs to get the frame off it’s block. Times 3 is 1860 lbs for one side, so a total weight of 3720 lbs. The way I did this the tongue weight was basically zero, so I’m ignoring it.

So obviously there’s some error here, let’s call it +/- 10%, or 370 lbs. I had guessed the trailer was 400lbs, but let’s up that to 500. That gives me a boat weight of 2850 lbs.

That actually seems pretty reasonable, and is much closer to in line with other 24s/25s with swing keels. Were they just being that optimistic with the brochure? It’s a pretty big difference. Any other data points would be nice to see.

Scales at the dump grounds are normally low key and fairly slow when the weather's bad.

Thanks. The transfer station in my town doesn’t have a scale that I know of. If I find one I might try that.