Benjamin Russ is immersed in a virtual world at the 45,000-square-foot Brunswick Boat Group Technology Center. He’s wearing a virtual reality Gravity Sketch headset and hand controls, and looks like he is performing a stylized tai chi exercise, with slow movements and occasional pivots to change direction.
The computer monitor behind him shows that he is laying out the design of a boat interior, while periodically marching around a virtual human being to validate that his design is people-friendly. He is operating within the 3D design, not just creating it on a computer screen.
Such are the types of things that happen every day at the center, which opened in 2019 at the Boston Whaler campus in Edgewater, Fla.
Courtesy Brunswick Corp.Inside the Center
Brunswick CEO David Foulkes created the center to consolidate fiberglass boat design, engineering, prototyping, testing and validation for the Boat Group as it develops the next generation of Boston Whaler and Sea Ray products. Bobby Garza, vice president of product development and engineering for the Boat Group, says the center “gives us the ability to leverage a highly diverse set of skills, knowledge and experience across our team to help develop new technologies and concepts. Efficiencies are realized when our teams can seamlessly transfer knowledge from past programs to the next round of new products being developed.”
Those teams include industrial designer Bryon Maloche, who says computer-aided design tools such as Gravity Sketch have far more than theoretical benefits. “You can transfer the 3D design from it to [the software] Rhino and turn it into a viable model that can be used for manufacturing.” Currently, Brunswick uses cardboard and plywood mock-ups, which are time-consuming and expensive. Not only could the digital tools replace those mock-ups, but they also let people anywhere “walk through” a design to see it and contribute to it.
Courtesy Brunswick Corp.Another team member is designer Jacob Wilson, doing boat design on a Wacom Cintiq creative pen tablet. Others are using old-school pen and paper as they support not only Sea Ray and Boston Whaler, but also Brunswick’s other 15 boat brands. The teams are constantly searching for trends and ideas.
“Our teams hold weekly meetings just to discuss what we’ve found,” designer Matt Morelly says. “We also have a consumer insights team that researches things such as what consumers like most about our current product compared to previous models. This helps to create future products that are going to resonate well with a new demographic and new customers. They also study social, economic, environmental, technological and political zones, then try to identify any patterns between them.”
Courtesy Brunswick Corp.Senior industrial designer Kristin McGinnis says a classic chat is also part of the process. “We also do extensive interviews with current owners to find out how they use the boat, what they like and don’t like, and even observe them boating if we can,” she says. “At several points throughout the design phase, we will also present our design to dealers for feedback.”
Advanced designer Lee Rosario, who focuses on future technology, recently started using a DALL·E 2, which takes a descriptive phrase and generates countless images to bring it to life, using Google. For instance, if the operator says or types, “a koala dunking a basketball,” within seconds, there are images of a koala dunking on the screen.
“An example of a phrase a Brunswick designer might use,” Rosario says, “is ‘a speedboat that looks like a Ferrari.’ Before, a designer using conventional means might just come up with a series of sketches to start ideating. DALL·E 2 helps us supercharge that process. So instead of a few sketches in a few hours, now we can generate hundreds in seconds.”
Courtesy Brunswick Corp.While design skills are important, people skills are paramount, according to design director John Barbier. “I would say 80 percent of your success in product development is your ability to negotiate. Often, we’ll come up with something that’s kind of out there, and engineers will push back and say, ‘That’s not possible.’ It becomes a kind of back-and-forth dealing until we find something that works for both sides.”
At the same time the boat’s topsides are being designed, a naval architect starts designing the hull. “Sometimes we’ll discover things like adding another 6 inches of length would give us everything we want on this boat, and they can adjust their design to make it work,” Barbier says.
Courtesy Brunswick Corp.Engineering Keeps It Real
According to Jeff Etapa, director of engineering at the nearby Edgewater Tech Center, about half of the 155
employees at the Brunswick Boat Group Technology Center are engineers who perform diverse functions. “We use a high-performance, phase-gate development process that’s also used throughout Brunswick,” he says. The five gates are definition, research, design, engineering and integration as a project moves to the production floor.
Once the sketches become more mature, the advanced engineering team starts asking more practical questions about construction and costs. “It’s also important to catch any problems early in the process,” Etapa says, “because it’s much easier to fix them than in the later stages.”
The engineering team also looks at things like hull pressures and settles on parameters such as length and beam. Then the team can start dialing in the hull design optimization using computational fluid dynamics and advanced performance predictions.
One major consideration is whether a boat will receive the latest suite of technology from the Brunswick ACES strategy. Will it have digital switching? Fathom e-power? The engineering team also discusses custom graphic user interfaces. “During this stage,” Etapa says, “we’re leveraging the relationships we have within Brunswick and other partners that we have to optimize and finalize the design. The SLX 260 Surf was a good example of the collaboration between our team, Simrad, CZone and MerCruiser.”
According to Etapa, the entire design and engineering phase typically takes 12 to 15 months. The next step is to engineer mechanical systems, such as hoses, pumps, fuel tanks, trim tabs and engine rigging. Once that’s done, the completed Rhino 3D design model is ready to be sent out to create tooling.
All the fiberglass parts are done in-house at the Brunswick Integrated Manufacturing Center at Merritt Island, Fla. It has five-axis mills and can do final tooling, which can also be done at the Boston Whaler campus. Parts like the new Power Tower on the SLX 260 are built by vendors that work closely with Brunswick’s engineering and design departments. A final engineering step is to create a lamination schedule before construction begins.
In addition to the 155-employee Brunswick Boat Group Technology Center — by far the largest — there are three other product development and engineering centers used to create new models for the corporation’s 17 boat brands. The Aluminum Fish Group Tech Center in New York Mills, Minn., has 25 employees. The Pontoon Tech Center in Fort Wayne, Ind., has 25. And the Venture Group PD&E in Edgewater, Fla., has 12 employees.
Sea Ray’s Ugliest Boat Ever
One of the ugliest boats Sea Ray ever built came to be after engineers tried to build on the groundbreaking SLX 260 Series designed by Sea Ray’s first all-women design team.
The SLX 260 earned all-around accolades and led to Sea Ray senior design manager Carrie Fodor and Brunswick Boat Group senior industrial designer Kristin McGinnis winning the Designer of the Year award in the 2022 IBI/Metstrade Boat Builder Awards. However, in addition to an outboard version and a traditional sterndrive model, a surf boat was included to take advantage of MerCruiser’s Bravo Four S forward-facing drive.
Creating that surf boat presented engineers with a major challenge, according to Jeff Etapa, director of engineering at Edgewater Tech Center. He says the resulting prototype proved one thing: “That boat showed why engineers should never design a boat. It was all function and zero form. We built the stringers out of plywood, and no effort was made to make it look good. We were just trying to dial in the best wake possible, which we did. But it got some really weird looks on the water here.”
Thankfully, the production version followed the sleek hull form of the other SLX 260 models.
This article was originally published in the January 20232 issue.
