Stem to Stern: Industrial Art
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My close friend and fellow boat builder, Gary Hilliard, and I were recently reminiscing, over a snort of Buffalo Trace, about when and how we learned our mutual trade. We both came up through the ranks, working for my family, and learned the ropes together. After a second glass of illumination, we concluded that it was a shame that most young builders in the trade today don’t learn the numbers of the how and why from the mold loft floor through commissioning with traditional shipwright’s tools and a manual of calculations in hand. After one more shot of courage, we determined that everyone today is an idiot. Going forward, we should probably hold it to two glasses. The essence of the conversation, before crossing the lucidity threshold, was that people today don’t have a clue what makes things tick. We push a button and out comes the desired result. Within the digital code of that program resides the math and artistry from data banks of historical successes and failures by scientists and accomplished craftsmen, now reduced to a keyboard command that anyone can use. A disturbing result of this is that, since everyone pushes the same buttons, we are cloning boats.
Gary and I learned the how and why by doing. I’m self-taught. It’s not something in which I necessarily take pride but after the death of my uncle Tommy, someone in the family had to pick up the ball and run with it. Tommy was self-taught as well and when he left this earth, the magic of his design and construction technique at our yard was beamed up to God’s boatyard along with his creative soul. We were suddenly left to our own devices, an iconic team without a coach or a playbook. A formal education in our trade would have spared me from a lot of mistakes but on the other hand, learning by doing explains it all in Technicolor.
There exists today, no cyber substitute for sighting down a spline on the drawing board or a batten on the floor when it comes to understanding a fair line. In a typical lines and body plan, adjustments to any line in one grid affect the lines in the other two grids. Waterlines, buttocks and sections—it is a process requiring extreme concentration and isolation from distraction and from that process; one learns how to manually design a fair, three-dimensional structure. Hydrostatic values are then calculated with Simpson’s Rules from planimeter area readings taken from the lines and body plan. The formulas date back to Archimedes. From the faired lines on the floor, patterns are made, and the build process begins. Within this proud tradition lies an acquired discipline that no machine can teach. This ancient calling now appears to be circling the drain.
Boat building today is primarily a sub-contract based enterprise. Like modern medicine, where there are corporate specialists providing services which used to be done by your doctor in his or her office, most of these services are now remote, independent, billable entities. In modern boat building, the conventional wisdom is that all answers lie in technology. Design and engineering are done on the computer by an outside contractor. The design firm offers the builder his choice of Sportfish hull A, B, C, etc. with the builder adding his styling suggestions to the window line, cockpit, sheer break, etc. The files created by that design contractor are sent to another contractor with five axis CNC capability, creating patterns, jig sections and joinery, which are cut by the machine. The superstructure process is much the same. The end result is that, like Caucasians, most boats being built today are strikingly similar. The name of the builder is the only thing unique about them. To top it all off, most customers want their boat to resemble all the other boats in the marina, like some parochial sport fishing academy uniform which fuels the cloning mania. It’s damn near impossible today for the layman to spot anything unique as he or she strolls down the dock.
We maintain our design work in house. My father used to tell me to “Make your own mistakes. Don’t let someone else do it for you.” The gist of his advice was that it is easy to be led astray by outside influences and, in the process, get your ass handed to you. A lot of design firms seek to make a mark of their own with your product by defining your look, adhering to popular trends, market studies and reliance upon conclusions based on theory or hearsay and not actual experience or sea-trial data. The responsibility for our design is now, and has always been, ours alone. I still participate in the design process for which I have had a love affair for almost 50 years, and I still get a chance to look down the batten with Flip and the boys when patterning a stem, fairing a new hull jig, or setting a camber on a foredeck. But as I look around the industry, I realize that there aren’t many of us left that still design in-house. There is also very little old-school shipwright work being done. Most of it is a process I refer to as hack and mud. Get it somewhere in the ballpark and shovel on the fairing compound. The focus seems to be much more on spectacular CNC cut interior joinery or trendy exterior styling and not on making the boat parts fit or fair. “Just let the mud do that.” How much mud weight are builders adding to the boat in lieu of good shipwright skills? Hell, if Boeing did that, the airplane would never successfully complete the takeoff rotation.
As I mentioned in a previous discussion, the auto industry suffers from the same design boredom. I used to be able to tell a Chevy from a Ford from a Chrysler, a mile away. Each brand had its own look and pushed the limits of creativity with each new model year. New designs were hand drawn in much the same way as boat designs. Then clay models were created and painstakingly faired to allow for full scale review before production of the actual body panels. These days, new cars are designed on computers, using common design software, resulting in undeniable similarity. I now have to walk up to the car and look for the manufacturer’s logo to see which foreign conglomerate produced the vehicle. With the possible exception of the Corvette, car companies are producing conformity with no human imagination. Industrial Art has been replaced by technology and it shows.
Before you dismiss this as another Pleistocene rant from the missing link, listen up: We are not anti-technology. The practical application of it can make our job easier and more efficient when used correctly and the combination of technology and human artistry can take us to creative levels unachievable without that pairing. We enthusiastically incorporate the latest in design and material technology into each new build. My son, Dusty, has that formal education in Naval Architecture and Engineering that eluded me, and his contribution and leadership make the boats we build today better, faster and more efficient than anything we built in the past. He enjoys the advantages of an engineering degree with a digital mastery of the latest design software, coupled with frequent, unsolicited advice from a father who can still recall how things were done when the Earth was flat, and reptiles ruled. One of his greatest assets is his insistence on simplifying for us what has become incredibly complex in the systems associated with modern boating. He understands what makes things tick and his grandfather’s problem-solving genes become more apparent each day.
The solution to the loss of skills and human artistry lies in education. It is all well and good to offer classes in “Outboard Motor Diagnostics” or “Introduction to Marine Electronics” in community colleges. Those courses are readily available because they are easily taught from a textbook or laptop. One must teach with the batten in boat building. Our industry needs to encourage the development of our specific trade skills through public education and apprenticeships to put the craft back in craftsmanship. When I attended Junior and Senior High school, before indoor plumbing and the discovery of fire, we had a required semester of power mechanics, a semester of carpentry, one of sheet metal and one of drafting. They called it “Shop.” Evidently, those Shop classes were discriminatory and have been eliminated in lieu of a more progressive academic curriculum while industrial art dies the veiled death of obsolescence. Generations raised on Google and 3-D printers will soon be incapable of building or designing anything from scratch. Hell, we might already be there. If … What was that? Uh-Oh … Sorry … OK … Check, please. Hey, Gary, I … uh … I think the bartender just cut me off. That guy is an idiot!
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This article originally appeared in the January 2024 issue of Power & Motoryacht magazine.
Source: https://www.powerandmotoryacht.com/blogs/stem-to-stern-industrial-art
