Mention the word “technology” in reference to boatbuilding, and most people think of exotic combinations of resins, composites and carbon. Maybe they think about a foiling boat gliding effortlessly above the water. Or an electric or hydrogen-burning engine.
At Brunswick Corp.’s aluminum-boat companies, “high technology” means training welders with virtual-reality simulators. Instead of a nervous student trying to bond molten metal and throwing an accidental arc, there’s the safety of VR goggles and a simulator.
“It’s less intimidating for people to learn, and it’s more cost-effective than teaching them on a shop floor,” says Brian Hines, global vice president of operations and quality at Brunswick Boat Group. “We try to hire experienced welders, and we try to build welders internally. They start out doing sanding and cleanup, but we give them a path to becoming a welder.”
In today’s marine industry, technology is less about materials than it is about using autonomous processes and equipment to build boats more efficiently and safely. “Our advanced manufacturing strategy is to reduce the amount of labor we need with advanced design and manufacturing processes, and the other side is making our work more attractive to people,” Hines says.
To present a design to a client, naval architect Doug Zurn used to draw by hand with ink on mylar, and a typical rendering would take about 40 hours. Now he uses Rhino CAD software and will have 16 iterations of an interior in 40 hours.
Haves and Have Nots
Using advanced technologies makes more sense when a company produces a volume of products to justify them. That gives Brunswick an advantage because it has 13 boat companies under its umbrella. The challenge is that each company serves a different market.
“Lowe is a different market than Lund,” Hines says. “It’s about choosing the right materials and the right processes for the market you’re trying to serve.”
Brunswick’s fiberglass boat group can make its own tooling and plugs at its Merritt Island, Fla., facility. The equipment includes multi-axis routers and 3D printers for smaller parts. Sea Ray uses robots to spray gelcoat into molds. Another area where Brunswick is using advanced technologies is interiors. Fabrics are cut with numerically controlled equipment, and sewing machines are not your grandma’s Singer.
For improved sustainability, Brunswick uses a parts nesting system that helps reduce waste when cutting pieces out of a sheet of plywood. It gets more parts out of the sheet and leaves less waste.
When a part like a helm console is created, Brunswick uses a 3D scanner called a coordinate-measuring machine. A robotic arm traces the part, and then the computer stores the data, creating a blueprint so the part can be made with the same directions every time.
“You take the 3D scanner and lay it over the model. It will make it the way you want it to be made,” Hines says. “We have an advanced manufacturing team that is collaborative for best practice sharing across the plants.”
On the aluminum side, Brunswick has moved away from plasma and CNC cutters to lasers and higher-speed manufacturing machines. For less-appealing jobs like riveting, robots have taken over the task at Princecraft and Brunswick’s New York Mills, Minn., facilities. Hines says Brunswick is looking at 3D printing for rapid prototypes, as well. At many Brunswick plants, robots cut post-production holes for items like sterndrives and through-hull fittings.
In addition to repeatability and improved accuracy, Hines says, automation can help solve workforce issues. “You can’t hire 15 boatbuilders, because they don’t exist,” he says, “but you can hire people who can run a machine. It produces repeatability and reduces errors.”
Return of the Machines
One company that supplies robots to Mercury Marine and some boatbuilders is Fanuc America, which is based in Rochester Hills, Mich. A recent adopter is Regal Boats, which purchased robots for its hull and deck manufacturing line and for small parts fabrication. Regal will be using the robots to apply gelcoat and chopped strand mat.
Fanuc has been manufacturing robots that can spray gelcoat and chopped strand mat for 30 years. The company was making inroads with the boating industry until the financial crisis hit in 2008 and 2009. “The industry went quiet on us,” says Barton Faylor, senior industry marketing/program manager for automotive component and general industrial paint at Fanuc.
Some of the higher-volume applications where Fanuc saw early adoption were at Yamaha, and Polaris and Bombardier with personal watercraft. Bombardier installed gelcoat-spraying robots at its PWC plant in Mexico. They are still going strong. “The bad news about our equipment is once someone installs something, it’s another 20 years before we hear from them,” Faylor says. “As long as we train them on how to keep it working, then they’re just kind of doing their own thing.”
Gary Kowalski, senior district manager at Fanuc, says the marine industry is a tough nut to crack because of a determination to adhere to tradition. “They kind of had this attitude of, we hand-make our boats,” Kowalski says. “We were trying to show them how we could make a higher-quality boat with more boats per day with the same number of labor hours and increase profitability.”
While some might expect that robots would find a place in a facility that makes million-dollar yachts, Faylor says it’s easier to get a foot in the door at a higher-volume company that makes 18- to 20-footers. The most common job for robots in fiberglass boatbuilding is trimming the flanges off hulls and decks after they come out of the molds. This saves companies in more than one way. Yes, the robot saves on labor, but it also reduces the cost of personal protection equipment and air conditioning because the company doesn’t have to pump as much fresh air into the room where the trimming takes place.
The robot also takes the human element out of spraying the correct ratio of resin and fiberglass. “We’ll put the right amount of material in the right places without overspray or underspray,” Kowalski says.
He recalls that after Fanuc installed robots at Yamaha, the resin delivery company had to change its trucks’ schedules because the amount of resin being used dropped so dramatically.
Extended Vision
At his design firm in Marblehead, Mass., Zurn says he first used a computer to design the Shelter Island Runabout with MultiSurf software. “I did a small rendering to help sell the design,” he says. “With MultiSurf, I could push and pull surfaces in and out.”
Today, he uses Rhino design software and a subpart called Orca3D Marine that does computational fluid dynamics. Another software called Chaos lets a designer draft interiors. A customer can even get a tour of a potential boat using VR goggles. “With the goggles, people can walk through their boat before we even build it,” Zurn says.
The computers help speed up the process, but Zurn says a full-size interior mock-up is still the best way to see how the inside of a boat will look. His firm had a full-size mock-up of a 52-footer at Boston Boatworks alongside a 44-foot model.
To make the strongest, most efficient laminate stack for a given boat, structural analysis software improves and speeds up the process. “We try to employ the best material for the purpose at hand,” Zurn says. “Taking advantage of structural analysis to use the best material in the right place is something we’re always striving for.”
Another computer program helps determine the best location for equipment in a boat, to forecast how it will affect performance. On the MJM 50, this got challenging because some owners ordered the boat with triple outboards and a dinghy lift, while others wanted twin engines and no tender.
“We have extensive Excel spreadsheets that account for everything on the boat,” Zurn says. “Because we design boats in the 30- to 80-foot range, they’re small enough that you can do a detailed weight analysis.”
When Zurn developed a boat for Hinckley, the company 3D-printed a model that was 38 inches long. “It was a wonderful tool for the design and development team,” Zurn says. “I always kid the builders that someday we’re going to go from design to printing a boat.”
Material World
When it comes to materials used in boatbuilding, Zurn and fellow designer Michael Peters, founder of Sarasota-Fla.-based Michael Peters Yacht Design, agree that technology peaked 15 to 20 years ago and has basically plateaued. “Builders and designers were doing prepregs and oven-cured composites,” Peters says. “There were more builders doing it than there are now.”
Peters mostly works with epoxy resins with multidirectional fabrics like E-glass. In certain parts of a boat, he uses carbon. “Ten or 20 years ago, people were using carbon because it was a buzzword,” Peters says. “Now you need to use it as an engineering material.”
When it comes to design elements like foiling or alternative propulsion, Peters says, “You’ve got people chasing electric foilers. I think we go off on these science projects that are really fun when someone else is footing the bill.”
Useful technologies, he adds, are the ones that companies apply to everyday work. As an example, resin infusion was seldom used until builders realized it improves accuracy and repeatability. “Fiberglass parts are more predictable because of infusion,” Peters says. “We’re able to get closer to the line in predicting what the weights are and can maintain it.”
Additionally, with all the equipment that customers are requesting on a boat, Peters says, there’s less focus on a vessel’s weight before it’s rigged. Things like Seakeeper stabilizers, bow thrusters, refrigerators and windlasses improve quality of life aboard, but they add pounds, too. “We designed a carbon fiber, 129-foot sportfish, and the guy put commercial freezers in the stern,” Peters says. “The weight savings just makes room for all the things people want.”
The evolution of large outboards and new design trends such as flip-down topsides have also combined to make it more challenging for designers to make a boat’s stern strong enough. Peters says this has led to design firms using a structural engineer to examine every layer of material being used in the stern, to make sure it’s strong enough to support the engines that customers want.
“In the program you’re working with, you need to create a 3D model of every single layer of fabric,” he says. “If you’re using a triaxial fabric, you’re dividing in between the layers. Instead of doing the calculation in a day or two, it takes weeks.”
Once the transom laminate is complete, the client might come back and want fold-down hull sides to expand the cockpit. “That wreaks structural havoc on the boat because you’ve broken it,” Peters says. “Now the structure is only as deep as that lowest part of the boat. The beam that was your topsides is gone.”
Comfortably Familiar
J.B. Currell, the founder of Biobrands.net, has been in the composites world for nearly 40 years. This past spring, he sold Gibco Flex-Mold, which makes prefabricated nonslip surfaces, to Patrick Industries.
He says that when it comes to the boatbuilding fraternity, there’s an attitude of, if something works, don’t fix it. “I remember going to the IBEX show with MAS Epoxies,” says Currell, who started the company with Tony DeLima in 1991. “It was really interesting how we would bring new products to the marketplace and people wouldn’t change.”
That’s not to say that there aren’t niches where people are pushing the edge. Companies like Patrick, Design Concepts and Marine Concepts are working with 3D printers for plugs. “The trick is we can print a mold and not have to go from the plug to the mold, and the answer is, yes if you’re not too concerned about the finish,” Currell says. “You can print the frame, and you can print the mold, but you still have to reinforce them.”
He would like to see S-glass get more interest because it has 30% more strength than E-glass and is less expensive than carbon. Currell says that E-glass was designed for insulation while S-glass is structural. E-glass also has a shorter strand than S-glass.
Renewable materials like bamboo and basalt are getting some attention, but they’re not commercially viable, Currell adds. Silicon-based molds and vacuum-bagging are gaining popularity because the bag can be used again and again, and because there’s a reduction in volatile organic compounds. “You’re not throwing away as much material when you’re using a silicon bag and a silicon mold,” he says. “The technology has been around, but it’s a matter of the manufacturer learning to use it to make smaller parts with less VOCs.”
Could a manufacturer program a robot to use silicon to make those smaller parts? “At Brunswick, we’re doing a good job of heading into that direction pretty rapidly,” Hines says. “I see more advanced manufacturing processes where the jobs are less difficult, and it makes it easier to recruit.”
This article was originally published in the October 2024 issue.
