I’ve visited countless boatbuilding operations around the country and abroad. Some are as organized and clean as a surgical theater. Others resemble my backyard shed — an unkempt, dysfunctional mess.
Despite the polarities, I have noticed one similarity among a disproportionate number of boatbuilders: the company they use to build their fiberglass hull molds and other tooling. Often, it’s Marine Concepts.
Owned by Patrick Industries, Marine Concepts operates two factories, in Cape Coral and Sarasota, Fla. The latter is a 300,000-square-foot, five-building manufacturing facility that is a former home of Wellcraft. Marine Concepts employs around 440 employees and has boatbuilder clients such as Malibu Boat Group, Mastercraft, HCB, Chaparral, Robalo, White River Marine Group, Invincible, Yellowfin and Regulator. All in all, the organization crafts as many as 3,000 fiberglass tooling parts each year, as well as fiberglass molds for companies in the aerospace, wind energy, theme park and other industries.
“We can do everything from turning a builder’s computer-aided design files into a mold to turning a napkin sketch of a concept boat into a full-fledged design,” says business unit director Ross Kennedy, who started with the company in 2016. “We have 15 engineers, naval architects and other design staff on payroll, some with more than 30 years of experience. This allows us to do everything from a keel-up design to validating designs brought to us by our clients.”
Marine Concepts can build a wide range of items, from 60-plus-foot hull molds to tooling for hatches, hardtops and other fiberglass components. At the heart of the operation are seven five-axis CNC mills that carve intricate hull and fiberglass parts from clients’ CAD files. It’s a complex process that starts out high-tech and finishes with a massive amount of handwork from skilled workers.
“We’ll do just about anything for a client,” says director of design and engineering Sidney Lanier, who worked on the Sarasota property when Wellcraft was based there. “It’s our job to help turn ideas into the products. We’ll assist customers, from sourcing stainless-steel parts and other components to making complex design ideas work in the real world.”
Some boatbuilders order only hull and deck molds from Marine Concepts, while others order everything from the keel up. The secret sauce that gives the company such a dominant market share in the mold and tooling business, according to director of operations Glen Naroth, is a combination of top-quality service and speed.
“We can be a one-stop shop for customers without the infrastructure to support extensive engineering, design and tool work, and we’re also very sensitive to builders’ schedules, which often involve a strict timeline,” Naroth says. “Builders often are eyeing a launch event at a specific time, and we have to be able to put together orders to meet those needs. It’s something we’ve been good at for many, many years.”
Marine Concepts was started in 1976 by Augusto “Kiko” Villalon, who visualized a design and development
company that could see a boat’s build through from start to finish. Robert “Bob” Long, a past Wellcraft president, and his wife, Karen, bought the company in 1994. They opened a leased facility in Cape Coral the same year, with the Sarasota location opening in 1996. Long would go on to purchase the Wellcraft property in 2011.
It was the addition of the company’s first CNC mill in 1997 that allowed it to leap forward in its mold-making and fiberglass tooling operations. “No doubt this wouldn’t be the company it is today without CNC mills,” Kennedy says. “Our seven mills in Cape Coral and here are the backbone of what we do, and allow us to be competitive on both price and delivery times.”
Building a hull mold and other fiberglass tooling are complex processes that require hundreds of hours of skilled handwork, piles of sandpaper, gallons of polishing compound, many pounds of steel, and oodles of tooling gel, resin and fiberglass. It is hot, dirty work that requires a special kind of workforce to pull off well.
“No doubt, we have workforce issues like everyone else,” Kennedy says. “We try to be competitive by creating a positive work culture, paying well and doing everything we can to make coming to work enjoyable, but there’s no getting past the fact that it’s hard work building tooling and molds.”
The process on the factory floor starts with a CAD file from any number of different software programs that the company’s CNC mills can decipher. Some builders supply these files from their own design offices, while others tap Marine Concepts’ team of engineers and naval architects to complete that work.
Once the files are validated, large blocks of expanded polystyrene foam are glued together and assembled — often on a plywood backbone — to form what will become the hull or tooling plug. The oversized hunk of foam is next moved into the CNC mill, where a cutting head begins to whittle away the foam into the male hull or tooling shape. The process can take a day or more.
Tolerances are incredibly tight. The machines account for expansion and contraction of the mill’s frame due to temperature fluctuations on the factory floor, and most mills are set atop a thick pad of concrete to eliminate vibrations from machinery such as forklifts. Precision is important even at this early stage. “We’re talking fractions of millimeters,” Kennedy says. “We have to continually calibrate the mills to ensure accuracy. It’s an ongoing job.”
The finished piece is a male plug that will be the base for many additional steps to come, the first being the application of a high-density overlay material. The material is sprayed over the EPS foam plug and then rough-milled by the CNC machine before the long, laborious process of sanding begins.
“There’s a ton of sandpaper and handwork involved,” Kennedy says. “It has to be done by humans. Machines and robots are not at the point where they can sense an imperfection like eyes and the human hand can.”
As we wander through the factory, dozens of workers wield sandpaper on a deck mold for a 60-plus-foot sportfish. Others sand smaller tooling, such as hatches, interior components and structural grids. Fifty-five-gallon drums sit full of discarded sheets of sandpaper. “We have a very good relationship with 3M,” Kennedy says with a laugh.
After sanding of the high-build material is complete, another process begins that can take many days or weeks on large
projects: Layers of tooling gelcoat are sprayed onto the plug. “We use orange or green gel because those colors contrast so well with others,” Kennedy says. “Orange is most common. Others specify the green.”
The gelcoat cures for a predetermined amount of time before the fiberglass team jumps into action. Depending on the mold, multiple layers of varying types of fiberglass and vinylester tooling resin are laid down to form a durable female mold — a negative of the final part — whether it’s a hull mold or hatch tooling. Vinylester resin is used because of its strength and ability to handle the exothermic heat generated when catalyzed resin sets up in the mold during the boatbuilding process.
Kennedy says some tooling can be made with a single-piece mold, while some requires two or more parts. “Sometimes the hull or part shape is complex enough where more than one mold is necessary,” he says. “We also have to take account if the final part is going to be made using vacuum infusion. Those molds need an airtight gasket where the mold parts join.”
Sparks fly as we round the corner to where steel bracing is added to the molds. This is the next step in the process and ensures that the mold does not flex or distort under heat and what can be thousands of pounds of gelcoat, fiberglass cloth and resin laid inside it to create a hull. Bracing also creates a structure that allows the mold to be manipulated and turned, to allow easy access during the gelcoat and lamination processes.
Perhaps the most intensive work begins next. This is the step when the final tooling surface inside the mold must be polished to perfection. Larger defects require gelcoat work, while smaller defects can be polished away with machine buffing and cutting compound.
Kennedy shows me a crew working on a large deck mold under lights that reveal every imperfection. Some defects are so small, I am unable to see them with my untrained eyes. “These folks can spot and fix the smallest problems inside the mold,” Kennedy says. “No tooling comes off the floor perfect. We’re talking hairline scratches and the tiniest of bubbles or dents. These molds do not leave the factory until the surface is absolutely perfect.”
A properly constructed mold can last almost indefinitely with the right maintenance. That’s a good thing, considering a large and complicated set of complete molds for a boat — hull, deck components, hatches and more — can cost more than $1 million from conception to design to completion.
“Most builders know that to get the most out of a set of molds, they have to maintain them after every part is popped out of them,” Kennedy says. “Otherwise, the surface suffers, and the quality of what comes out of them declines quickly.”
Large hull molds are shipped by truck to the customer, with 16 feet being the maximum width allowed on U.S. highways without a police escort. This restriction can also be a determining factor in whether a mold is done as one piece versus two.
Kennedy says that, looking ahead, he’s not sure whether toolmaking will change, but for now, the robots are not taking over. “Three-dimensional printing also is not there, but we always keep our eyes on emerging technology that could potentially help our processes,” he says. “It’s always worth exploring new tech.”
This article was originally published in the August 2024 issue.
