AMF sailboats: an industrial conglomerate's turn steering the world's best-selling sailboat
"AMF sailboats" is a bit of a misnomer: American Machine & Foundry never designed a boat. It was a large, diversified American manufacturer -- best known for making bowling equipment and for owning Harley-Davidson for a time -- that bought its way into sailing in 1969 by purchasing Alcort, builder of the Sunfish. For years afterward, AMF ran the world's best-selling small sailboat as one line among many in a sprawling industrial portfolio, until the same top-down management style that built that portfolio began pulling it apart, and the boat business was sold off piece by piece.
Origins and ownership
American Machine & Foundry Co. was established in Brooklyn around 1899 to make tobacco machinery, and it grew over the decades into a diversified manufacturer with an eclectic mix of products. Acquiring outside manufacturers was a recurring pattern for the company; it picked up DeWalt Products Co. in 1949, continuing DeWalt's radial-arm-saw line under the AMF name. Alcort fit the same pattern: in 1969, Alex Bryan and Cortlandt Heyniger sold Alcort Sailboats to AMF, and the conglomerate began large-scale production and marketing of the Sunfish globally, making some minor deck and hull tweaks along the way for manufacturing efficiency.
By the late 1970s, AMF's top-down, bottom-line-oriented management style had led to declining product quality, operations left obsolete by a lack of investment, falling revenues, and accumulating financial losses across its business units -- and the sailboat line was not spared. In mid-1985, Irwin Jacobs of Minneapolis's Minstar Corporation bought AMF, intending to spin off Alcort and seeing no benefit in continuing to support the Sunfish Class organization. On July 18, 1985, the International Sunfish Class Association assumed class management from the manufacturer as AMF prepared for the spinoff -- the class taking over its own governance because its corporate owner had stopped caring. On February 14, 1986, David Loveless and Jerry DeGarmo purchased the Alcort business from AMF and renamed it Alcort Sailboats, Inc.; between 1986 and 1991 the division changed hands several times before Loveless and DeGarmo sold it, in 1988, to Pearson Yachts of Portsmouth, Rhode Island, led by J. Gordon Clayton. Pearson separately acquired the rights to the Laser and went on to develop the Sunfish design used afterward; LaserPerformance later manufactured the boat under Pearson's design. AMF, Vanguard, and eventually LaserPerformance all took turns steering the Sunfish brand in the years that followed.
The designers
AMF Alcort backed two other design efforts worth naming, even though neither is the reason the company is remembered. In 1972, Fred Scott and Jack Evans designed the Force 5 for AMF Alcort, and it went on to become the company's second-best-selling boat, with more than 15,000 sold worldwide -- until Pearson bought up the rights to the Laser, at which point the Force 5 ceased production as a direct result.
The Trac 14 has a different, and unusually well-documented, backstory: it was the American-built version of the Windrush 14, a one-design catamaran whose Australian Mark I -- then known as the Surfcat -- was designed in 1976 by Richard and Jay McFarlane, with manufacturing rights to the Windrush 14 itself later bought by Windrush Yachts in 1986. The Trac 14 in AMF's own catalog is simply that Australian design, built stateside under a different name.
Construction through the eras
Under AMF, the Sunfish gained flashy hull graphics and multicolored sails, and the boat caught on with a younger generation of sailors as well as with racers including Dennis Conner and Garry Hoyt. In 1971, the original brass rudder fittings were replaced by a spring-loaded kickup system first developed for the smaller Minifish. The 1970s brought two competing daggerboard shapes: an unpopular, swept-back "new" style with less area, and a "Barrington" style, developed by the frostbite fleet, that proved just as popular as the original round style. At the peak of AMF/Alcort's production, as many as 60 Sunfish a day left the factory in Waterbury, Connecticut.
The boats built a racing culture to match the volume. The Sunfish Class Association, formed in 1969, grew out of events and racing organized by Steve Baker and later Lee Parks for the AMF/Alcort Division; for almost twenty years, Sunfish racing and AMF/Alcort were synonymous. On January 1, 1984, the class gained International Class status from the International Yacht Racing Union, while still under AMF/Alcort. In 1977, Fortune magazine named the AMF Alcort Sunfish one of the "25 Best-Designed Products" of the era, ranking it alongside the Porsche 911 S Targa, the Trimline Touch-Tone phone, and Adidas running shoes. By the 1980s, the Sunfish had become the best-selling sailboat in the world.
Lines and generations
The Sunfish so dominates AMF's story that it is easy to forget the company sold other small sailboats alongside it. The Trac 14 catamaran, built off the Australian Windrush 14, offered buyers a twin-hull alternative from the same catalog. Beyond that, AMF's lineup also included the 2100, the Puffer, the Hilu, the Sunbird 16, the Trac-16, and the Trac-18 -- boats that carried the AMF name but for which little independent documentation survives.
Who AMF is for
AMF is not a brand a buyer chooses for its own design pedigree -- the interesting design work happened at Alcort before AMF bought in, and at Pearson after AMF sold out. What AMF's ownership window offers instead is scale and a specific slice of history: boats built during the years the Sunfish became the best-selling sailboat on earth, when a corporate parent with no sailing pedigree of its own poured mass-manufacturing muscle into a small, simple daysailer and, for a while, made it ubiquitous.
