Hand-Made Wooden Fender Boards

Have you ever used a fender board to protect your boat when you’re docked alongside a piling? That answer may be yes, but have you ever managed to buy one that’s professionally made? Chances are that answer is no. Not because fender boards don’t exist, but because nobody seems to make and sell them. If you surf the web, what you will likely find are various forum posts from boaters asking for advice on how to make their own, then receiving an onslaught of responses debating whether to use water-sealed wood, synthetic decking material, or pressure treated lumber. It’s the same conundrum mechanical engineer and amateur carpenter Mike Guldenstern faced three years ago when he was planning a trip to Nantucket.

“As an engineer, I’m a bit of a Boy Scout, I like to figure out what I need to do and be prepared,” Guldenstern says. “And there’s this big, big notation on the marina literature that says you need to have your own fender boards because they’ve got fixed docks at the Nantucket Boat Basin­—captains are required to bring them. At the time I was like ‘Oh, what’s a fender board?’”

A few minutes of Google image searching cleared that up, however Guldenstern was unable to find any where to order one. After a quick call to his Saber broker (he owned a Saber 45 Salon Express at the time), the engineer was told it’s not something people can buy. “He tells me, ‘You gotta find a cabinet shop or just do it yourself, but you can’t buy them.’ And I’m like, that just seems crazy,” he says.

So Guldenstern handcrafted his own—a simple pressure treated, edge-rounded board that still looked better than most every DIY project you’d see hanging over the side of a boat. And how did it perform? According to Guldenstern, “awesome.” That trip, he notes, he saw 50 mile per hour winds that left most visitors at the Boat Basin constantly worried about resetting their fender positions to avoid bumping into anything. All the while, Guldenstern just enjoyed his vacation.

To Guldenstern, it felt like he was hovering over a small, yet untapped portion of the boating industry. He knew he had sniffed out a good idea and had a family member who’s an accomplished utility patent attorney investigate what had already been done—he came back with a patent from the 1800s, which of course, had long since expired. The woodworker also knows he’s not inventing something new. “We know we haven’t made something new and we’re not trying to say we have, but this is an interesting sort of confluence of interest or convergence of interests,” he says.

This isn’t Guldenstern’s first stab at entrepreneurship, either. He owns a commercial energy consulting company. So naturally, he utilized his existing resources to get things moving, recruiting a company intern from the University of Chicago named Connor Pool, as his right-hand man. The duo went out and bought a few different types of wood, played around with different sizes and made about a dozen different pairs of fender boards. “I gave them to some really avid cruising friends, one of which is a fellow Saber owner and he was like ‘Oh, this is this is great, I love these things,’ so it was some more super early feedback.”

Realizing he didn’t have time to make a hundred more boards, Guldenstern turned to a business group he belongs to, called the Young Presidents Organization, to figure out how to get them produced. He told himself: “This has to be a fully baked ecosystem of products—everything we do has to be exactly like I would want it if I was buying it and I can’t be disappointed in detail.”

With details in mind, Guldenstern went on to produce not only beautiful fender boards to compliment shiny cruisers, but even sharp looking, waterproof, anti-microbial bags for storing them. A lot of cruising couples are older, so they didn’t want to use a regular pull zipper, and instead opted for T-shaped handles that could allow two fingers to hook and pull from, he notes.

Guldenstern has high hopes for his product, which will launch later this year from his website Fenderboards.com.

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Source: https://www.powerandmotoryacht.com/gear/hand-made-wooden-fender-boards