MasterCraft IMTEC98

Thursday October 1st, MasterCraft held a press conference. Gary Lownsdale, President of MasterCraft announced their new strategic alliance with General Motors. The Cadillac division will market MariStar luxury boats with Cadillac's new Escalade sport utility vehicle. They had one of the new prototype Escalade's at the show. It looked very sharp and I was unable to photo it as it was always surrounded by a crowd. The MariStar boats feature the Cadillac NorthStar engine marinized by Inmar.

The story of how the engine received the NorthStar name was told at the conference. They surveyed the existing engines and graphed them. A design point up and to the right of them was established for the new product. Engineers began to call the target the North Star and the name stuck on into production.

On the plane ride back, I picked up a copy of the current issue of Car & Driver magazine. It spoke of Cadillac's new sport utility vehicle and offered an artist sketch of what the new vehicle might look like, since it has not yet been seen by the public. I thought it was kind of "cool" to have seen the prototype at the show.

Their Marketing Director announced a new program called Boat Smart that involves every new owner receiving "on land" and "on water" instructions and orientation with their boat. He also told of their efforts to have colleges offer water skiing as a graded class. It sounds like they have been up to a lot of good things for boating. Congratulations to MasterCraft !

MasterCraft received the newly created Innovation Award for the most innovative process. The award was given for their new clay modeling process used in the tooling phase to make plugs. The process significantly reduced design times. Congratulations to MasterCraft !

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