DCB M42R Update—Liner Notes

For audiophiles who love recordings on vinyl, liner notes are the text on album covers. Pure poetry or complete gibberish, they exist to tell the story of the record.

Before DCB “drills a a single hole” in the cockpit liner for its new M42R catamaran, seat position has to be perfect.

For Johnny Bauer, the vice-president of DCB Performance Marine, “liner notes” are paper templates that dictate where things such as seats in a cockpit-liner go in a catamaran. Yesterday evening when only Bauer and DCB president Jeff Johnston remained in the Phoenix facility, Bauer showed me his own version of “liner notes” for the new M42R catamaran coming from the company

With a little help from his reporter-friend, Bauer rolled out a paper template in the liner for the 42-footer. Then he positioned the shell for each seat in its place.

A closer look.

“We want to know that everything is perfectly positioned perfectly before we drill a single hole,” Bauer said, then grinned like a kid who just opened a Christmas present. “Eventually, we’ll make a metal version of this paper template.”

The ultimate goal, Bauer explained, is replication. The most custom of custom-catamaran builders, even DCB needs to maximize production efficiency. Thanks to the DCB version of liner notes, the time it takes get seat position dead-solid perfect in hull No. 1 should drop to a fraction of that in all subsequent builds.