April/MAy 2018 59YARD PROFILE: Schooner Creek
for the owner. But it takes a boatbuilder
to do it. You can’t ask a fiberglass lami-
nator to build it unless he has a tool.”
Rander described the process: “The
mold is a simple matter of taking what
is supposed to be the outside of the
hull, using the hull lines as designed
and hull offsets, or, as was the case with
this boat, a set of Mylars were printed
of the stations and half-stations
directly from the computer.” [Mylar is
the brand name for a stable stretched-
polyester film made by Dupont/Teijin
Film Enterprises; specifically, it is
known as BoPET, or biaxially oriented
polyethylene terephthalate—Ed.]custom builder who commissioned a
5-axis-milled plug from a West Coast
business and had it trucked across the
country, claiming it was less expensive
than making the plug itself.
Rander says such builders usually
end up throwing the foam plug away,
and that his method costs a fraction of
“going to a tooling company and say-
ing, ‘Tool me up a mold.’ All my boats
reflect those savings. The trick is to
have parts and pieces of tooling you can
use for whatever. But for the actual hull
shape, you want to build it quick and
fair. No sense putting value in it [the
hull plug], because there’s no value in itbuild a female mold. It’s a little tougher
getting the surfaces fair, so if you start
with a product like wood to build the
tooling (it is self-fairing), you end up
with a fair product before you have to
start working to make it fair. It can’t be
done in this industry with composites.
Everything has to be made fair.”
“Doing so many multihulls,” I ask,
“did you make a female mold for the
new M&M catamarans?”
“Yes, we have a cedar-strip-plank
mold out here we’re producing boats
out of. As long as it’s protected inside
it’ll keep right on producing boats.”
I mentioned a prominent East Coast“F
irst thing we do is ask ourselves: What is it we’re
actually trying to accomplish?
“To that end, everything is a tool—your employees,
your suppliers...they are all tools. If you keep them sharp,
everything goes easier. When you think about the guys
working next to you in the shop, never ask them to do
anything you wouldn’t do yourself, and once in a while go
prove it. And take on the worst part of any job and prove
it can be done as quickly as you say it can. How do you
build a 70' [21.3m] yacht from beginning to end in 10
weeks and have it sailing? There’s no way to do it unless
you believe it can happen. The objective is keeping all
your tools sharp.
“If it’s a rush project, how do you keep your suppliers
supplying you with everything you need? Usually it’s tell-
ing them you need it a month early. If your supplier has a
problem, then you have a problem.
“Be ahead of schedule at the very beginning. You can’t
make up time at the end; you can only make it up in the
beginning.
“Think outside the box and generate low-cost one-off
tooling. The cost of the tool should be less than the cost of
the part, so you can get the part out the door as quickly as
you can. No sense in building very fancy tooling if you’re
only building one of them. You have to weigh hand-finish
time versus boatbuilding time. If it takes less time to
hand-finish the part than it does to build a perfect mold,
then you should be hand-finishing the part.
“Depending on hull shape, look at various ways to build
the mold as quickly as you can. If you’re looking strictly
at a one-off, the question is: Do you build it inside out or
outside in? You might set out temporary stations and
frames and a couple of stringers and core it and do the
outside laminate. Finish the outside. Then roll it right-sideup and laminate the inside and complete the inside as a
quick way to do it. That’s a common way to do it.
“But if you are going to infuse or vacuum-bag a piece,
you can’t do it that way, because you can’t get it airtight.
Then you have to build a mold that is airtight. If you can
build a one-off female mold, great. If you can’t, then you
need to build a one-off male plug and then hand-finish
the entire boat. There is so much more handwork to do.
“Rage and Ocean Planet were finished that way, but they
were wood. The nice thing about wood is it’s self-fairing.
Rage has double diagonal veneers with core in between.
Others we built for Hong Kong and Seattle customers
were with strip plank because the material was more read-
ily available and it was faster. The outer skins were more
conventional 0–90° and 45–45° glass or carbon skins.
Look at the structure and see what’s the fastest and best
way to produce it for your customer.
“I feel sad for those who have not been wood boat
builders, because there’s a whole world of construction
techniques and ideas that aren’t existent anymore. So
when the average Joe goes to look at building a new proj-
ect, he has to figure how to get tooling made. How does
this happen? How does that happen? In our case, we have
been there, and sometimes it’s just the old-fashion shoot-
from-the-hip solution that’s best. We have all those arrows
in our quiver.
“One of the guys who worked here with us is now high
up in a well-known East Coast boatyard. They ran into a
problem on a project and one of the guys said, ‘WWRD?’
“‘What?’ came the response.
“‘What would Rander do?’
“I always think: What’s the end product, and what’s the
easiest way to get there?”
—Dan SpurrRANDER: OUTSIDE THE BOX
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