One of the catamarans under construction at Lyman-Morse Fabrication in Rockland.
ROCKLAND – Hidden behind a car dealership on the road leading out of Rockland to Thomaston, you will find Lyman-Morse Fabrication. It has been quietly operating for a number of years, but recently more people have taken notice of the interesting projects they have been turning out. I had received a call from the shop manager Jonathan Egan regarding Maine Built Boats, so when I stopped in, I was amazed at the aluminum boats they had under construction.
Jonathan started at the shop at the end of 2011, he explained, “Cabot Lyman bought it in the late 90s, I believe. He was running out of room down in the Thomaston boat yard. They had a small shop there with about 12 fabricators all elbow to elbow and he needed more space. At the time they were just building boat hardware for themselves. The structural steel shop that was here before Lyman-Morse bought it, the guys had some sort of issues, so they ended up selling the shop. When I got here it was a fab shop. At the time they had a project in house for a large canopy for Brook College in Manhattan. I was kind of hired to help with that project. It was a stainless steel, aluminum and composite blend which made essentially an aircraft style wing structure. It just stood out from the building with no braces or support from underneath or above. It was just a very rigid structure and it was huge and took up probably a third of this shop. It took us about six months to build and a lot of that was in the night, a long project. After that went away there really wasn’t much happening. The crew came way down to, I think, there were only about four people in the shop. We had to go find work because it just wasn’t going to sustain itself, a building of this size, with a crew, wasn’t going to bring in the kind of money we needed.”
Out they went looking for work. One of their customers is right around the corner, Dragon Cement. “We have had a great relationship with them over the years,” said Jonathan. “They bring us parts that are worn out and we will build them new ones and send them back. We built on that relationship. That was the one that really helped us get off the starting blocks so to speak. Then were a lot of other customers who came along through cold calling and networking. Over time that started to grow and grow. We created a website and did some targeted advertising. We added some machines. Drew (Lyman) has been really good about investing in new equipment for us. We got probably three or four CNC machines. We didn’t have any CNC technology in the shop when I first started and that has really helped. That is one thing we have done better is we’ve managed to stay up with technology and invested in the training for our guys to be able to do in-house design work. If a customer comes to us with a loose design our guys will create it in the computer, a 3D model. Our machines understand the 3D model software so we can send that straight to our cutting table, straight to our press break and it is a very expedient process. That ensures accuracy and limits the amount of re-work. Doing it the old school way, taking a paper napkin or whatever and just building it and the customer showing up and saying, ‘That is not what I wanted.’ Those days are gone.”
Lyman-Morse Fabrication does build all sorts of metal watercraft, but they have branched out to other fields. On the wall in the conference room was a cutting head for a seaweed harvester. “We take the customer’s design,” explained Jonathan, “then we look at it and say how are we going to make this in our shop with our equipment? How is it going to benefit us and the customer? We spend a lot of our time reengineering, or value engineering. It needs to be very buildable.”
As for the boats under construction, they have a 33-foot catamaran water taxi powered with twin 350s, for a customer in New York, a 28-foot landing craft and a 26-foot research V-hull. “Work boats certainly are becoming a big part of what we do, I think there is going to be a big future in that,” added Jonathan.
They just launched a small aluminum buoy tender for the State of Maine Bureau of Parks and Lands. She was designed by Response Marine of Newburyport, who they have built a good relationship with over the years with. This boat was 23-feet in length and was powered with twin 115-hp Yamaha outboards. It even had a little bow thruster. Jonathan explained, “They use it for deploying and retrieving concrete buoy mooring anchors. They spend a couple months in the spring, long days, deploying these out and then in the fall take them out all over the State of Maine. They already have a fleet of boats but they wanted to try an aluminum one. What they have now are the Boston Whalers and they are quite heavy boats. They are also nearing the end of their lifespan, so they wanted a different option.”
In New York City they lose millions and millions of gallons of water through leaks in the aqueduct system. One interesting project they did was an aluminum ROV winch, which contains 3½-miles of 3,000-volt cable on it, which is introduced into the aqueduct system to find leaks. They were having problems with the ROV having to shut down through overheating of the cable because it was on a steel winch. The cable was heating up within 20 minutes and then they would blast cold air on it trying to cool it. They found that they could not cool it fast enough. They reached out to J. F. White, a construction firm and asked Barry Griffin to come up with a solution. He made the winch out of 100 percent aluminum and the aluminum will automatically draw the heat out. The first winch they built for this company was an umbilical winch, again aluminum, for a one atmosphere dive suit. So, it was an aluminum cast suit and it had articulating arms and legs, it was just like the old school dive suit but it was super modern and the idea is you can get right down into the sand and use your little claws and kind of sift through the sand to find artifacts.
They have just received an order for a 30-foot landing craft for a customer from Camden so that will be started soon.
Jonathan is a native of England and met his wife Arissa, who is from Troy, Maine, in England when she was there in school. Jonathan added, “She had an opportunity to come over and do some sort of arts program. I was in the military and was stationed in Plymouth which is way down in the West Country. She had gone to visit a friend in Exeter, which is down towards Plymouth, and the two of us hopped on the same train and she kicked me out of her seat. We lived apart for a couple years, got married then she moved over and we lived there together for six years while I worked out my time in the military. I was in the Royal Marines Commandos for eight years. Before I left the UK, I went back to school for a couple years and did a technical school, a welding engineering course. They dove pretty deep into the background of welding. When I moved over to Maine, I struck up a conversation with a guy who was at Wayfarer, the HR guy, Jeff Lewis. They didn’t have any positions so I ended up going to work for Lie-Nielsen. I was there for only a few months and then Jeff called and said they would like to bring me on, so I went over and worked there for a few years before coming to Lyman-Morse. I used to go to Rockport Steel and pick up bits of material when I worked at Wayfarer and they were out one time so I came over here and got talking to the guys.”
What is the future? “I think more work boats are what we are going to see,” said Jonathan. “We are still going to continue with satisfying our regular client base and keep trying to expand that as well so I kind of see two lanes here for us, work boats and everything else. You really have got to be willing to adjust. I think that has been a strength of ours here at the fab shop. Drew saw around 2012 that it was slow and there were no luxury yachts being built. We did pick up business here and that was a big sign to him that he needed to diversify the company and that is what he has done. He has focused heavily on that.”
