Chrysler sailboats for sale

Buying a used Chrysler: the builder behind the badge may not be Chrysler at all

A used Chrysler carries an automaker's name, but the badge alone doesn't tell you who actually built the boat or when. Chrysler's own production window closed in 1980, a forced exit tied to the loan guarantees the company needed from the U.S. government, and at least one model - the Buccaneer - kept being built by four more companies afterward. Buying a used Chrysler means confirming which era, and for some models which successor builder, actually produced the boat in front of you, since a badge on the transom can outlast the company that built it by decades.

Which era to target

Boats built before 1980 came out of Chrysler's own Plano, Texas plant, where every finished inboard/outboard hull went through an in-house test tank and C-22 and C-26 keels were checked for swing- and fixed-keel leaks before shipping. Anything built after 1980 came from a successor company instead: Texas Marine International (TMI) through 1982, Wellcraft Marine's Starwind division through 1984, Gloucester Yachts through 1986, or Harry Sindle's Cardinal Yachts, which kept the Buccaneer and Mutineer in production until 2003. For the Buccaneer, hull number pins the builder down precisely - Chrysler-built hulls run roughly 1 through 4050, with each successor's range picking up from there - so it's worth asking a seller for the hull number before assuming which company built the boat.

What to inspect across the range

Across the early swing- and fixed-keel boats - the 20, the 22, and the 22 SK - a 2010 review flagged the inboard pivoting rudder as a recurring weak point: complicated, correspondingly hard to repair, and prone to collecting weed and plastic bags on its leading edge. Have any inboard pivoting rudder on these models inspected closely before buying.

Navigating the lineup

The lineup runs from small one-design daysailers - the Lone Star 13, the Pirateer 13, the Dagger 14, the Man-O-War 15, the Lone Star 16 - through swing- and fixed-keel cruisers in the 20-to-26-foot range, up to the larger 27 and 30. Which end of that range suits a given buyer has more to do with size and keel type than with builder pedigree; the full model directory on this page breaks out years and dimensions for each.