Force10 is a brand specially for sailors. They had the name that their products could survive in a salty environment. Not any more. The beginning of my story with a brand-new stove.
Force10 I rate for 2 on a scale of 10.
We bought this 2-burner when we were renovating the boat in Demopolis, Alabama. We never used our oven and thought we could save some space for other things.
Then we didn’t use the boat for a year, after that we started living on the boat again and used the 2-burners every day. Right now we have used this system for a year.
This is how it looks right now, after a year of use. The burner-tops are corroded, the piezo-electrical element doesn’t work because of the corrosion.
Force10 used at least 4 different metals. The black front is aluminum, the glossy part is stainless steel, the burner-tops are iron, the screws that fasten them are another kind of steel, the wiring is part copper or something like it.
If you think nautical, you don’t use that many kind of different metals. Of course the lowest one is heavily corroded. That is in this case the aluminum of the front-panel.
The nuts (of stainless) that were riveted on the aluminium are nowhere any more. The aluminum around them just pulverized. You can see that in this picture.
And with those nuts missing I had to do something. The whole thing fell apart. And I like my coffee in the morning and a dinner at night and so on.
So I start rebuilding this thing and see all the design-errors and the cheap stuff Force10 uses to put together something that will never last for more then a year.
It is a shame to sell a product like that for 450 US dollars (or somewhere around that). It was not cheap at all. But Force10 promised all the things we needed. Piezo-lightning, cardanic, auto-shut-off.
The stuff of Force10 is so cheaply constructed, they even cannot weld good enough the stainless steel support. When this would be the only error, I would say that their welder is only human and organize the repair myself without complaints. But on top of everything something like this is just too much.
Unique burners
I walked around here in Cartagena, Colombia. Of course the parts that are heavy corroded, the burner-tops are of such a strange dimension, they are nowhere to be found here. The manager of a shop with nothing then spare parts that was most helpful.
“You go to José in Getsemani, he will make good ones for you, out of alumunium, not iron”, he said. That the ‘gringos’ even have inferiour material to the Columbians made him laugh.
The front, I will do myself with wood and epoxy. Better isolator and no problem to attach it to the rest.
Can you image the time I spend in doing all these things to get my 2-burner system working? I can buy a 2-burner system for 25$ US, brand new, with parts available all over the world. The ‘cardanic mechanism’ I can make myself, but if you use pressure cookers for most of the time when you are sailing—as we do—you don’t need cardanic burners. Why do they say that sailing is tearing dollar-bills to pieces under a cold shower? Because of companies like this. Force10 is for me a ‘profiteer of the nitwits’ instead of a decent company that takes care of sailors-needs.
Why did I buy from Force10?
To be out of trouble. To know for sure that I have quality.
I regret to have to say to you that you will get force-10 head winds all the time of your life, if you buy this specific product from them. And I have the suspicion that it is with more then only this. I cannot imagine something like this comes from the drawing-boards AND comes into production and pretends to be quality.
I will wait for their reaction to make up my mind definitively. And you will be able to see that by help of the tags, but that is a complete different topic.
The website from Force 10
When I visited I noticed I have model 60100. They state in the product description that it is entirely made of stainless steel, and that is just a big lie as I showed here with pictures and all.
I wait for a reaction, but until then:
A big blow to Force10
And a big boo.
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