At a small launch ceremony for the test boat, team boss Grant PERFECT
PREPARATION STARTS HERE
Dalton said it was a complicated boat, demanding huge hours of work from the build team. ‘I haven’t seen one as complicated as this in all my time…’ That was probably more a reference to the sophisticated hydraulic and electronic control systems now central to making these ‘yachts’ work. Without minimising the task at hand, Hauser said the cat hulls
were long and narrow structures and ‘that is what we are obviously quite good at building’. The one-design nature of the AC50 hull rules means the modulus of the carbon fibre and the temperature and pressure of the cure are strictly controlled. The big focus will be in the precision and accuracy of the build, the integrity of the structures and the detailing. Along with the wings, Southern Spars will build the hulls, decks, cockpit soles and the foil wetboxes. These will be delivered to Team New Zealand’s own build crew, who assemble the boats and install the complex and confidential control systems. ETNZ will also build the foils and rudders in-house. Hauser said their part of the boat construction would soak up
about 13,000 man hours. ‘To put that in perspective, we do more than 200,000 hours a year here – our biggest superyacht booms on their own can take more than 30,000 hours.’ Hauser said that while Southern Spars remains interested in diversifying into a wider composites market, including aerospace and architectural structures, he did not envisage conventional boat- building becoming part of its portfolio. Founded as mast technology transitioned from aluminium to
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carbon fibre around the time of the 1988 Deed of Gift America’s Cup, Southern was acquired by the North Sails Group in 2003 and then in 2014 was purchased by Oakley Capital. The level of precision on which the company prides itself is reflected in its modern purpose-built factory. When the factory was built the concrete floor had to be absolutely flat to provide an accurate reference base. ‘The floor is accurate to plus or minus 1.5mm over an area of nearly 8,000m2,’ says Hauser. This is literally part of a ground-up philosophy of eliminating variables. Southern Spars now employ 550 people at facilities in New
Zealand, South Africa, USA, Denmark, Sri Lanka and Spain. Auckland handles TP52 race masts and bigger, including maxis, as well as superyacht rigs and booms, which continue to grow in size and com- plexity. Like the quest for ever-taller buildings, the constant growth of superyachts is seeing owners contemplating 125m masts. ‘The booms are getting to nearly 40m,’ says designer Martin McElwee. ‘Mainsheet loads are approaching 70 tonnes and compression loads at the base of the mast already exceed 400 tonnes.’ The design work, detailing and engineering that go into providing
all the comms and other infrastructure carried by these huge rigs can be as time consuming as building the ‘tubes’ themselves; it is no surprise these rigs now represent multimillion dollar invest- ments that can take a couple of years to complete. Equally, it is no surprise that ETNZ and Southern Spars can approach with confidence the building of a pair of 15m one-design catamaran hulls – long narrow things, it’s what they’re good at. Ivor Wilkins
AUSTRALIA
The team behind the team The smell walking into the Oracle Team USA base in Portsmouth is of vinegar, puzzling at first, then it becomes clear. The AC45 wing is on its side, and Andrew Henderson is leading the shore team in cleaning and checking its surface, running his fingers over the taught skin, tapping it with his fingertips, then moving 6in to tap again – turning his head slightly to focus with his left ear, then moving on to tap again, as a doctor would in a chest examination. ‘It’s pretty strong,’ he tells me, ‘but we have had a bird strike puncture it…’ James Gell is spraying the whole structure with water and vinegar mix from a five-litre garden sprayer, and Dylan Clarke and Dean Curtis have huge squeegees and are scraping water off the wing then wiping off the final smears with a chamois, leaving the whole surface immaculate. Setting up an America’s Cup foiling boat is a challenge. Looking
at Cup defenders Team Oracle USA, the shore crew are just as important as the sailing team, perhaps more so. As we have seen,
20 SEAHORSE
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