You Gotta Love it When a Plan Comes Together
Modern technology…WOW! We just finished building all the large molds for the 37, and I thought we would stick the plugs together to see how they look and fit. (Plugs are what the molds are built from, they are full scale replicas of the parts that will come out of the mold.) I stood there looking at the plugs for about five minutes and I think my exact words were, “Man, this is sweet.” Not only was it amazing to see my creation start to come to life, but the fit from part to part was so exact! I designed the entire boat using a program called Rhino 3-D. Ocean has been using Rhino to design parts of their boats for over 10 years now, but this is the first time using it on a new design project from start to finish. The old school way was to design the boat by hand on paper first, and then plug it all in to the computer later.
Designing this boat on the computer from scratch really forced me to think out every detail of assembly in advance, instead of just drawing a nice looking boat now and figuring out the details as we went. And what makes using this 3-D modeling program even more effective is the 5-axis CNC technology available for tooling. The design of each of our parts was emailed to a company in Florida called Marine Concepts where the plugs were carved out of a block of structural foam using a computerized router. And talk about having to make your design perfect, the router spits out exactly what you put in, so there’s zero room for error. The plugs were finished down there and then trucked up to Ocean’s R & D shop to build the molds. I’ve been in the marine tooling biz for 20+ years and I have to say I’m very much impressed. The exactness of the CNC milling was amazing. Designing this boat in 3-D was a real milestone for our company. I learned to tool boats using traditional lofting methods so I’m a bit old school myself. But I believe that with the diverse talent our company has and with the new technology we posses the doors are wide open for future designs. When I put those two plugs together out on the plant floor, and they fit perfectly, that was all the proof I needed.