It’s no secret that high performance boatbuilding is a brutal business, and not just because you have to deal with some of the biggest egos on the planet. Deals can be risky, the ebbs and flows are huge, and your reputation is often in the hands of some careless sailor a half a world away.
That’s why most composite builders these days are making their bread and butter on things that make more commercial sense. Marstrom long ago split off an entire industrial composites division more than a decade ago (to build motorcycle fairings, amongst other things), while many boat and sparbuilders have diversified into wind turbine parts and hydropower components and stuff you’re not allowed to talk about with ordinary citizens.
One of the most advanced builders of them all has gotten even more creative. Monday, a Newsroom story reported that NZ’s Core Builders not only builds parts for the first all-composite rocket launcher (the space kind, not the bazooka kind), but they may soon be building flying cars.
It’s a cool story about the guys who are building boats or parts for every single team in the America’s Cup. “Smyth estimates 40-50 percent of the six boats that will sail in this Cup have come out of Warkworth – including the wings for Artemis, Team France, Softbank Team Japan and Oracle, and tooling (molds used for forming composites) for Emirates Team New Zealand and the British BAR.”
Read the story here.
