How

My new friend Tom soon became my partner in the 42 project. A long and very successful career as both an aeronautical engineer and yacht builder gave him a unique perspective on how a modern yacht should be built.

We began with a clean sheet of paper or....er....computer screen. You see, he wanted to build this boat like you would build an aircraft. That is to completely engineer the entire boat before commencing the build process. That is the way they do it with airplanes. I guess you have to have a reasonable expectation that it might fly before sending a test pilot up. You can lose a lot of test pilots if you aren't careful.....but that is another story.

Tom already had the beginnings of a boat design and manufacturing facility here and we became the first project. We employed Unigraphics 3D modeling programming to "model" the boat on the computer. These images are some of the first (before refining) that were produced.

I was soon to learn that it would take 4 or 5 people many months to complete the engineering and that then we would be making molds. Not just 1or 2 but perhaps as many as 30 before the process was finished. You see, to build a boat in the US and try and compete with foreign built boats, we need to streamline the manufacturing process to the point that we can produce a boat in a fraction of the time that it might take in China, Turkey, Brazil, or Malaysia. I will be posting pictures of the molds and progress as time goes on.

More to come...................