Experience, resources, delivery
Aston Harald, Swedish builders of the M32 World Match Race Tour cats, is now ready to move into other areas of high-tech marine manufacturing
The architectural and aesthetic beauty of sailing craft while on the water is one of the many inspirations that keeps us passionate about our sport. Even without being a boatbuilder all of us can appreciate the care and craftsmanship that go into the creation of the best high-tech raceboats.
Yet the details of how these boats are produced can be lost in a rattle of machinery and clouds of dust often located on the far side of the world, where concerns about the impact of the creative process of construction may not always be at a level commensurate with the cultural standards of the
customer… At the same time many of the clever techniques devised in the process of production can also be too easily hidden to the observer by the excessive clutter spun off when you are talking many hundreds – or even thousands – of man hours of manual labour. For this reason the craft of composite boatbuilding, even at the highest levels, has developed a reputation as being a difficult, dirty
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and untidy business. Much better than it used to be… compared with the days when we grew used to seeing an immaculate raceboat emerge from a grimy shed rented on a project-by-project basis; but even more recently many good boats have come together in conditions from which the average race car manufacturer would run a mile. And as for a representative from the aerospace industry… But times have changed and by embracing both a no-compromise approach to quality while pursuing a philosophy of clean working, the composites team at Aston Harald are at the forefront of efforts by the composite boatbuilding industry to improve its image.
This Swedish initiative started with Aston Harald founder Håkan Svensson’s Berg Propulsion sponsorship of the Puma programme in the 2011-12 Volvo Ocean Race. With a strong background in manufacturing and a passion for grand prix sailing, Svensson was inspired to dive straight into supporting the sport at a high level with the acquisition of
Plenty of room… the combined 3,700m2
of
work space available inside the assembly and laminating sheds of
Aston Harald is kept
immaculate by veteran builder Killian Bushe and Batt Battison, who consider it essential to their efforts to achieve maximum efficiency while also allowing visitors to better witness the creative process of high-tech composite boatbuilding
the Marström M32 catamaran programme. At the time this one-design class of exciting, fast, yet easy-to-assemble 500kg carbon cats was gaining interest but production had been unable to meet the steadily growing demand. With the technical support of boatbuilding legend Killian Bushe, builder of no fewer than five consecutive Whitbread/Volvo Ocean Race winners, new carbon tooling for the M32 was manufactured in 2014 with sufficient precision to ensure the absolute integrity of every hull and deck component while delivering a much larger number of boats. This tooling had to be perfect, so that the pre-preg carbon laminated moulds would not distort even when repeatedly used to cure components in an 11mx2m autoclave at bake temperatures of 120°C. Without both precision and robustness the components created would not achieve the minimum tolerances essential for a true one-design product – something that is more challenging when using the best high-tech,
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