Sailing Nahoa · video

What this video covers

Custom boat pricing breaks down into two primary cost drivers — materials (the bill of materials, or BOM) and labor — explained here by Todd Rickard, build manager for the Nahoa M, Ben and Ashley's custom aluminum expedition vessel currently in development.▶ 0:32 Rickard, who built dozens of FPBs for Steve and Linda Dashew in New Zealand, walks through the formulas yards use before cutting a single piece of metal: cost per kilogram of light-ship displacement, a rule-of-thumb matching labor dollars to materials dollars one-for-one, and a thirds split — hull structure, interior, and mechanical/electrical/plumbing each representing roughly a third of total cost.▶ 6:55 The spec document, typically 15–50 pages, precedes the BOM and drives it; without a spec, a yard cannot price accurately.▶ 10:03 Safety margin is a third major cost variable: low-margin coastal boats use shared bilge pumps and sail drives; high-margin offshore builds add shaft drives, multiple watertight compartments, crash boxes, high-capacity crash pumps, and no daggerboard cases — each adding fabrication cost.▶ 20:06 Aluminum construction compounds expense because every weld requires a person on the ground, versus a GRP hull popped from a mold in under a month.▶ 22:49 Warranty reserves and post-sale care add further cost that buyers rarely account for.▶ 16:13 The practical lesson: a fixed contract price requires predicting every bolt, hose clamp, and labor hour before construction starts — a discipline that took centuries of cost-overrun disasters to establish.▶ 12:33

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