How to find Original Boston Whaler Diagrams and Drawings

[jimh]

Boston Whaler provides links to many drawings and documents about their boats made in the period 1993 to present day at their website at WHALER.COM. There you may look up the drawings for a particular year, family, model, and drawing type. To locate the search form for finding drawings, navigate as follows:

1. visit WHALER.COM and the top page
2. in the banner click on the word EXPLORE (which is a hypertext link, although there is NO indication of that in the design of the webpage);
3. a new window appears, with several columns of text, which, again, are hypertext links (although there is NO indication of that in the design of the website);
4. locate the list on the left under the heading "WHALER OWNERSHIP" which is not hypertext;
5. click on the text "Resources & Maintenance" which is a hypertext link;
6. a new page appears with the main heading "RESOURCES * MAINTENANCE"
7. scroll down the page to reveal the form entry with the head "OWNER DOCUMENTS";
8. enter the search arguments for Year/Family/Model/Document Type.

The number and type of documents varies with the year, the family, and the model. Many newer models provide a PFD file for the Owner's Manual, which often contains multiple diagrams, drawings, and illustrations. Older models may provide detailed engineering drawings showing many components and part numbers.

[jimh]

As often happens, companies with websites just can never leave them alone for more than a year or two until some marketing guy decides to hire a new contractor to re-make the website (and also make maybe $100,00 in the process and get a contract to maintain the website for a monthly fee). Of course the marketing guy who ordered the re-make of the website is extremely happy with the new look, but he probably has no idea of the harm done by changing everything and the URL's that pointed to previous VERY USEFUL content.

This nonsense just happened at WHALER.COM, and as a result the above article that described in detail how to locate useful information is now completely wrong. And for a moment, I thought all the useful information was gone. But eventually I found (only some of it) and figured out how to get there. Here is the process:

To find PDF files of documents, drawings, and manuals, you must visit a new page:

Documents
&
Manuals
https://www.bostonwhaler.com/us/en/owners/documents-and-manuals

On that page is a search entry form called Find a document. There are drop-down data selection entry fields for

• Year (but only from useful from 2021 onward to 2027, and you must click on the text "Year" to reveal the drop down menu, and often nothing works and yoy have to reload the page or change to a different brower app).
• Series or what was formerly called "Family", and here you only get one choice until the model year is set 2021 or newer
• Mode l is what otherwise would be called length expressed as three digits
• Document Type is nominally "Spec Sheet" or "Owner's Manual" for most entries, or in some cases "Performance Report"

It was just a few weeks ago that this resource went back to c.2009 and contained hundreds of drawings and details about many older boats. That has all been lost in the website re-make. Apparently Boston Whaler now only care about customers who bought a boat less than five years ago, and then otherwise all they can offer is a specification sheet and a copy of the owner's manual. The documents for boats from 2009 to 2016 are all for a 285 or 280 CONQUEST. And there are no documents for boats made in 2017, 2018, and 2019.

This is really a tragic loss of useful information for prople who bought Boston Whaler boats.

To show how new-boat oriented this resource is, here are the total number of documents available by year:

2027: 97 documents
2026: 70 documents
2025: 63 documents
2024: 59 documents
2023: 52 documents
2022: 51 documents
2021: 66 documents
2020: 2 documents
2019: 0 documents
2018: 0 documents
2017: 0 documents
2016: 2 documents (285 Conquest or 285 Conquest Pilothouse Owner's manuals)
2015: 2 documents (285 Conquest or 285 Conquest Pilothouse Owner's manuals)
2014: 2 documents (285 Conquest or 285 Conquest Pilothouse Owner's manuals)
2013: 2 documents (285 Conquest or 285 Conquest Pilothouse Owner's manuals)
2012: I document (285 Conquest Owner's Manual)
2011: I document (285 Conquest Owner's Manual)
2010: I document (285 Conquest Owner's Manual)
2009: I document (285 Conquest Owner's Manual)