First crucial step toward Hull #1 complete.

When you look at the gleaming surfaces of any Nordhavn, it needs to be remembered that every square inch of a Nordhavn is built from highly polished perfectly fair female molds. But how are the molds created? First a male plug must be built using the lines and shapes from Chief of Design Jeff Leishman’s drawings. That plug must be finished to perfection before the mold is laid up over it. When all of the mold layup process is complete and the framing to stabilize it is built, the mold is released from the plug and the plug is then destroyed. Its one job in life complete.

The complete tooling set for a new Nordhavn project is comprised of hundreds of molds but the primary molds are the hull and the deck. Other molds include tanks, tables, consoles, doors, engine room flooring and much more.

Throughout all of 2021, Ta Shing has been laboring away on the mold set for our new N71 project with the hull mold being the foundational piece that allows us to start construction of hull #1 of the N71 project.

Symbolic of the hope of a bright 2022 ahead of us, the N71 hull molds were released from the plug yesterday and after some detailing will be ready to enter service…probably for the next 20 years or more. It is a very momentous occasion for us. That mold/tooling set will be a workhorse asset for PAE and will build at least 50 N71s – hopefully many more than that.

The remaining days before Chinese New Year commences will be used to further polish and prepare the molds for the lamination of hull #1 which is scheduled for February 8.

Happy New Year!!

PS: To avoid any confusion to those new to the Nordhavn world, you will notice the hull mold is in two halves plus another piece, which is the transom of the boat. Why? The finished hull has molded in rub rails which stand out proud from the hull surface. If the mold were one piece, the finished hull would be forever captured in the mold. In actual practice, the two mold halves are bolted together for lamination of the monolithic one-piece hull and then unbolted and pulled away from the finished hull.