Click on the picture to get an idea of the size of the Poseidon 5 Axis Milling Machine.

More How.......

Just a word on how we decided to proceed with building the molds. There are 2 types of molds that can be built. There is "soft" tooling and there is "hard" tooling. Soft tooling is when you build a female mold. This is usually done when you are making a custom boat or a production boat where you might make some changes to the design after you have built a few. Hard tooling is a permanent mold that you make from the very beginning. We elected to make soft tooling which allow for changes if necessary before proceeding with hard tooling.

The soft tooling is made by building a steel frame that has wooden ribs cut that shape the part that you wish to make a mold for. After the frames are attached to the steel frame, lathe or slats of wood are attached to the framing. To the left you can see the starboard side of the hull mold after the slats have been attached. The next step is to foam the part with a spray foam not unlike the expansion foam you can buy at a hardware store for insulating. This comes in 55 gallon drums and is applied using a special application spray gun. After the foam hardens, the foam is ready to be rough cut to the shape of the hull. This is done with our 5 Axis Milling machine. The milling machine is over 85 feet long and capable of making molds for much larger boats that this one. After the rough cut, a putty that hardens is sprayed on and then the milling machine completes a fine cut that is the exact shape of the part that will come out of the mold.

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

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...................