Left: advertising the Vanguard 420 1970s-style. Before Harvey did his bad thing we might have risked a little joke here but not right now, no thank you. Fast forward and, like those legendary US auto dealership ads, Harken’s marketing starts putting the management in front of the camera: in this case (below) Peter Harken studies the company’s 1987 roll of honour with President Mac and Vice-President Sharky (more on them next time…)


And now this high-torsion resistant cable really does that kind of a job. As usual for us it was more trial and


error, trying different materials at full scale rather than pure engineering which I don’t think would have solved the problem. This was a very hands-on project! SH: Always simplicity… PH: Simplifying is, I think, the way ahead. Also lighter weight in things like winches and so on. Most advances are really made through the new materials technology. But a lot of things that look new have


job to create gear that makes it easy and more intuitive without a big learning or physical requirement. If we carry on working at that to keep making it quicker, easier and more reliable we’ll get people sailing. But if we don’t advance that and keep making sailing easier we’re going to lose them. That’s why powerboats have come back


a lot. Because a guy can drive a powerboat now like a car. He doesn’t have to be a seaman and know how to put the boat in the dock by reversing his engines – if he’s got two engines it’s a lot easier, but if he’s only got one he has to be able to know how to handle his rudder back and forth! He’s got to be a seaman, sort of. These new powerboats, they’ve got a


toggle and you kind of point it where you want to go, you just slip the boat sideways into the parking slot. That’s what cars are going to be doing pretty shortly. And now they’re becoming very reliable, they’re easy to start. So people can get in the power- boat quickly, they can go to the beach, have a picnic, take the family – and the guy doesn’t have to learn anything at all about seamanship. So the powerboat industry has really gone up in a lot of ways where sailing is still pretty flat. I mean, sailing’s doing OK with it all,


we’re still healthy, but we’ve got to keep working at it like heck. Take furling, I think that was another one for us… again not a breakthrough but very important in making sailing easier and faster. There were furling units out there before us. In fact, Ted Hood of Hood Yacht


Systems was one of the more famous ones before we moved into it and the French guys came on and so on. They made very good units, but they were still higher friction and just harder to handle in most cases than what’s going out now. To bring that ease of furling into smaller


boats all we really did was make the drums so much more friction-free. Plus they’re


46 SEAHORSE


lighter and reliable. Furling a jib has become a big thing, a big safety thing, of course – in the Vendée Globe boats and other offshore races it’s extremely important that that stuff really works correctly! The latest thing is what we call Reflex


furling where you have the cables now for free-flying spinnakers and gennakers and all that. You can coil it up, it’s not a stiff wire any more. It’s not an aluminium foil which you can’t take down, not while you’re sailing anyway. It’s made of com- posite fibres with a stainless steel mesh around it that makes it torsionally very stiff, which is important for the sail to roll up evenly, and yet it can be coiled to about 3ft diameter and pushed down a hatch. Before the high-torsion resistant cable


came out they were setting the sails on ‘lines’ and so on, but the problem is when you tried to furl them the sail would bundle up stuff and look pretty bad. So what everybody has really been trying to do is come up with something that’s as stiff as a foil, so the sail rolls up on it nicely and yet you can roll it up and put it in the boat.


already been invented, like our ball bear- ing block – they were making them back in the late 1700s or 1800s, I think. They were wooden blocks with wooden balls in them, believe it or not. The only reason I think they didn’t become popular was, and I can just envision the poor guy trying with a knife or apple peeler device, making a round ball out of wood (laughter). He just didn’t have the machinery and the materials. So much of what we’ve done has been


because of new materials. The winches used to be big, bronze, heavy things and now it’s all carbon fibre, and titanium, and all that sort of stuff, ceramic bearings, the whole deal. SH: And manufacturing? PH: The world’s becoming much faster in terms of everyone demanding when they want stuff. That’s why we ended up building our own factories here in Italy and in the US, then buying in the latest machin- ery to make things quicker than we used to and with the least complications. We can now take a chunk of aluminium


and put it in that machine and it’ll turn out a traveller car… one of our smaller traveller cars in eight minutes, the whole car. We don’t touch it. The program is in the machine and we don’t have to reset it every time we come. We can make one car as efficiently as 100 or 200. So we’ve changed the company in a lot


of ways, we basically manufacture for maybe two weeks’ lead time rather than the previous six to eight weeks. We get 30-40 per cent of orders out the same day! The bigger things and big amounts take longer, but we’re usually only talking three days. Basically all of our orders going into the machine shop now are more or less for just two weeks’ work. Back in the older days… and it wasn’t


too long ago, a couple or so years, we would make enough parts for a year and stock them because of the time it took to set up the machines for each part. Now you try to turn out as many parts as you can for


w


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