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Where art though woodworkers???

Travis Johnson said:
The company has tried a few things in order to get good workers. Last year when they were right desperate for workers, they hired many people that may not have had much boatbuilding experience, but had a good attitude. By working with the state, the state paid part of the wages while they learned the boatbuilding skills. That worked out pretty well as a lot of these learned a lot in the year long program

Now they are trying something else...well at least the owner is. Technically the company has nothing to do with this, but the owner has bought a local college campus and has turned it into a Boatbuilding Technical Center. It has not started up yet, but he is in hopes that the training it provides will fill the needs of the yacht building places here on the mid-coast. You see its not just our company that is hurting. The yacht building industry is just hoping right now,and there are a lot of yacht makers here. (Big yachts, small yachts,and those in between).

Carpentry that involves 5 axis curves, carving, furniture design is very difficult and time consuming to learn, but so are some other trades. One trade that is really hurting is marine electronics. The last boat we built had every conceivable electronic device on it that is possible. Just look at the picture of the helm that I posted,and you can see its state of the art. The problem is most of the marine electronics workers never dealt with this stuff. I mean who has. The owner is hoping that by starting this school he can get employees of this caliber...again not just for us, but for the yachting industry in Maine.

Myself, I think this is commendable.This is a lot of money he is personally investing. Granted he's quite young, and the employees he trains and retains now will be around when he's ready to retire, but its a huge investment in people. It may not be the only answer to the shortage of quality workers granted, but he's definately banking on it being a big help.:dunno:
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Sounds to me like the company's owner is on the right track, or even tracks :thumb:

It may take a while to really bear fruit, but these are exactly the sorts of things they need to do to ensure a surplus of workers with the skills they want. Here we are talking about apprenticeship programs, and this guy basically is starting a technical school!
 
Travis,

Up here in the Pacific Northwest, a lot of our custom boat building occurs in a fairly small town called Port Townsend. There are a number of custom boat fabricators located there who specialize in everything from completely wooden (lap strake style) to plywood stich-n-tapes (e.g. Sam Devlin) to fiberglass injection molded boats and everything in between. Many of these are "one-off" style designs valued well into the millions of dollars.

I know for a fact they have both apprenticeship programs as well as specific schools available for the craftsmen who are interested in this type of career. Perhaps your employer should consider advertising in the local newspaper or at the schools to take advantage of these already existing resources.
 
Travis Johnson said:
.....We ended up redoing a lot of the work that another company did just because the polishing was sub par, and the boats are so one-off, that no prints do it justice. In fact blueprints are merely "guides". Its frustrating because sometimes something will measure perfectly fine, but it still does not look quite right. Looks are everything, so the measurements be darned...looks win every time.
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Just had to comment on this. If you have never spent much time around wooden or custom built boats you probably don't realize just how true this is. Looks are EVERYTHING. And sometimes you can't design good looks. They have just have to be worked on on the shop floor and on the boat.

I have spent a week or more on the computer tweaking the plans for the kayaks. Getting them to look just right, the right curve to the deck, the sheer line just right, the angle of the bow and stern, etc.

Spent hours looking at a 3D model and spinning it looking at it from different views. Now that I am done the computer will generate the offsets diagram with all the dimensions for cutting the panels for the boat. I will lay them out and then I will take a long batten and "fair" the lines some more. Changing what the computer says to "Make it LOOK right". Thats a skill that is hard to teach. You almost have to have a bit of an artists eye to see it.

Travis, you did a good job describing that.
 
Most boat building had been done for centuries

Just using the eye of boat builder and the in grained feel of what looks right.

Here are a few of the beginning pics of the lay up process of building my last boat, my Whitehall 20'

On second thought instead of posting a few, you can see the whole process here on line.

http://community.webshots.com/user/slvrgost

There are several albums that show the different stages.

Enjoy.....

Tom...:)
 
Times has changed . I don`t really think for the better though ! If I was around that area , I would be interested in that !
 
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