Sailing Nahoavideo
How Do Builders Actually Price a Boat?
May 17, 2026 · 29 min · 54K views · Netherlands
Harlingen harbor with historic boats under clear blue sky
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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