This is a transcript of Mad Mariner's MadCast, the podcast that covers all aspects of boats and boating. In this edition, our guests are Mark Welsh and George Blaisdell, executives with Triumph boats, which has made a name for building one of the world's toughest vessels. The hulls are so indestructible that the company has produced a series of viral videos to showcase the kind of far-out licking they can take. Perhaps you've seen a Triumph being hit by a semi or slung into a tree? Mark and George join us to share their insights with Mad Mariner Editor Glen Justice.

Tell us a little bit about what Roplene. Why is it that you chose to use that as your construction material, because it certainly is something different?

George Blaisdell: Roplene, it's really a name that we've coined and it's rotationally molded polyethylene and it's a type of thermoplastic and it's rotationally molded meaning part goes into a big oven and out comes a boat.

Tell us a little bit about the properties of Roplene. Obviously it is an extremely tough material and that's why you use it. How did you come to find this and tell us a little bit about the genesis of the operation?

Blaisdell: Well, the material has been around for a long time, almost as long as there's been plastics. It's used in all sorts of products from crash barriers to white water kayaks. The application of it for us in powerboats really started when an American was down in New Zealand and he came across the technology. They had been using it down in New Zealand and Australia for a number of years and he thought, "Boy, this is a pretty great idea." That turned into a manufacturing company here in the States which was known as Logic Marine. And we were making boats using the technology but taking it to the next step. The boats they had been building down there were a little crude, not quite as refined, and we have been working diligently to try to take it to the next level.

Polyethylene, the base material that we use, does have some great properties. Toughness comes from the fact that the material absorbs energy pretty well. That energy absorbent quality translates into a soft quiet ride and that's one of the things that we always try to emphasize to our customers, yes it's great having a boat that you can run into a dock or a rock. That's kind of your insurance policy. You're hoping not to have to do that, but that soft quite ride is really one of the big payoffs of the material. And then it doesn't oxidize like Gelcoat does or at least in the same manner and makes it easy to clean. It doesn't absorb water so you don't have blistering to deal with. It's just a lot of neat properties of the material.

I understand you don't have to wax it either.

Blaisdell: No waxing, you know, the color is molded all the way through. If you ever scuffed it up and you wanted to fix it you just sand it and buff and you're done. You're not going to go through a paint layer or Gelcoat layer like you would on a aluminum or fiberglass boat. Low maintenance.

Do people put anti-fouling paint on them or no?

Blaisdell: You do, but that's the thing about barnacles is they'll grow on about anything.

It's a wonderful material but maybe not wondrous in that regard.

Blaisdell: If barnacles do get on it our material it's different in that if you take the boat out of the water and let the barnacle completely dry out for a week or two you can scrape the entire barnacle off the boat whereas on a fiberglass boat that base or footprint of that barnacle it's there forever and anybody that has ever tried to sand it knows how hard that calcium is. It just doesn't sand, but the Gelcoat around it sands quite nicely.

Tell us a little bit about the construction process. Most people know how a fiberglass boat comes together. Tell us how a Roplene boat comes together.

Blaisdell: We start with a plastic. Many people may be familiar with plastic in a pellet form. It's similar to a pellet that would come out of a BB gun. For our process those pellets are ground into more of a powder form, like a real fine sugar, and that material has all the coloring agents are in it, the UV protectant, the thermal stabilizer, all the things that are required to make a long-lasting durable product are all in there. It doesn't get added during the process.

That powder goes into a mold, our molds are made out of aluminum typically, and they're in two pieces in that you'll have hull portion of the mold and then you have a deck portion of the mold that sits on top and we put those two halves together and we blow in this powdered polyethylene material and it'll fill the hollow cavity to about maybe a third of the available space that's taken up. So the whole mold with the powder inside it goes into an oven. The oven is at around 500 degrees Fahrenheit and that mold, once in the oven, starts to rotate and that powdered material is tumbling around inside the metal mold and as that heat from the oven starts to heat up the interior surface of the mold. Once it gets to around 325 degrees that powdered material will start to melt. Sort of like snow flakes hitting a hot windshield, it'll start to melt and stick and as that layer gets hot enough, another layer will be deposited.

During that whole rotation process the oven itself is rocking through about 90 degrees, 45 degrees to the bow, 45 degrees to the transom. And all of this is controlled by a computer and we have a bunch of thermal couples that are measuring the temperatures in key areas and we direct heat to the key spots. We can control how thick the boat gets in the different areas but eventually all that powdered material is deposited in on the inside surface and it completely melts or centers into a uniformed consistency and we take it out of the oven and we let the boat cool down until we get to about 150, 160 degrees Fahrenheit, separate the two halves of the mold and essentially out pops a completed boat. It's got the stringers, all the structural elements are there, we have molded in anchor points for our cleats and other high load components.

We let the boat cool a little bit longer and we inject what leftover hollow space there is. Our typical wall may be five inches across and the wall thickness of the plastic of the Roplene is about 3/8 of an inch. So you've got four inches or so of hollow space that we inject urethane flotation foam into. The polyethylene that we use is naturally buoyant and then we inject that urethane foam into it to meet Coast Guard flotation requirements but also just to take up that space and help with the sound deadening and just make for a little stiffer boat. As a result we end up with about three to five times the amount of foam that's required by the Coast Guard so it truly is an unsinkable product when we're done.

I was reading where you guys use some special screws that actually can melt into the plastic.

Blaisdell: We have a variety of different fasteners that we use for different applications. We use one particular fastener that doesn't actually melt in but it has a special thread design that prevents it from backing out because the material is pretty slippery, I mean that's one of the good characteristics of it, and that slipperiness can sometimes make a screw want to back out. This particular fastener we use has a high load thread with a saw tooth, kind of shark tooth they call it, cut into it so that the material will actually flow back around it. One of the things about when you put a screw into fiberglass is you're actually basically crushing and pulverizing the glass and the resin because the material doesn't move at all. Our material actually gives a little bit so the material can flow back around the threads. We also use things called togglers which other people use or are available to use on other boats which are pretty neat and those are really strong when you put those in for attaching high load components.

Roplene isn't widely used. Obviously there are thousands of manufacturers out there and most of them are building in some kind of metal or fiberglass. Why do you think it's not more readily used?

Blaisdell: Well they're building boats this way in Europe and Australia, New Zealand, Norway. There's quite a few people doing it. We're a little bit more traditional I think here in the States. But another big factor is the cost of entry. Somebody can start building fiberglass boats pretty cheaply especially if they're unscrupulous and they're splashing somebody else's hull. But for us, you know, you're looking at a lot of capital equipment to get things going, you know, the ovens, the molds and so forth. That slows people down. And the learning curve, I mean, we've been at it for 14 years and we feel like we're a lot smarter than we were 14 years ago and somebody else would have that steep path to climb. And then another big factor of course is we have quite a few patents on our process and the core way in which we build boats to protect ourselves.

Tell us a little bit about the downside to working in Roplene. What are the disadvantages?

Blaisdell: Well, we're pretty straight forward at a boat show, I mean, somebody comes into our booth and maybe isn't familiar with Triumph and they start looking at the product and one of the things that they may comment on is that the boat doesn't look quite the same as some of the other boats. We don't have the same shine, gloss, finish that some of the nicer fiberglass boats have. And frankly we don't try too hard to get it perfect because we're selling carefree, durable boating. We don't want you to get caught up having to polish your boat and wax it and do all those things. But the material itself isn't ever going to get quite to that same luster that you're going to get from a glass boat. The boats do look good. And we always tell people look at the boats now but let's look at the same fiberglass boat and our boat five years from now or 10 years from now and do a comparison. Our boat is going to look much the same. Fiberglass boats they take some abuse and wear and tear and don't handle it quite as well as our material.

There's been some arguments that smaller parts made of Roplene don't fit as well, like a hatch cover. Is that your experience or would you disagree with that?

Blaisdell: We cook our material into a boat and then we cool that boat. The cooling portion is as important as the cooking portion when we're doing our process. We have a three percent shrinkage rate meaning when the boat starts out in the oven like a 20 foot boat it's going to end up being, you know, six to eight inches longer, or shorter once it's cooled. Fiberglass usually you're looking at about a quarter percent so we have 12 percent, you know, or 12 times as much shrinkage that takes place during the process. So managing that can be a factor but we've gotten pretty good at it and, you know, most of our hatches and things that we're using now are all going into CNC routed parts. So we have one CNC part matching another CNC part. That really takes that whole fit out of the equation.

You sometimes read that your boats are heavier than some of your competitors and obviously that can impact speed and fuel efficiency. What's your take on that?

Blaisdell: People do ask the question – our boats are definitely heavier than certain fiberglass boats but they're also lighter than others and we're going to be a little bit lighter or maybe the same but generally we're a little lighter than a premium fiberglass product. There are some more entry level fiberglass products that are built lighter to save money and we are going to be heavier than those just because we're positioned in the market place to be in that mid to high end range. We put oversized pretty much everything on our boats to try and reinforce the world's toughest boat position that we hold. It's important to us to have an efficient running boat and when you look at the speeds that you get and so forth I don't think we pay a big price.

Now the top of your line is 23 feet, is that right?

Blaisdell: Correct. We could call it a 24 footer because it's 23-feet, 8-inches, but we've chose to call it a 23 for a variety of marketing reasons.

Do you see larger boats constructed of Roplene in the U.S. or abroad, or are there some design and manufacturing characteristics that really make it a material better suited to smaller boats?

Blaisdell: Well, you're certainly able to build bigger boats. We have the ability to go up to probably 25 feet with the equipment that we have, and that's really what limits us right now. Our largest oven would allow us to do a 25 foot boat. If we want to do something bigger than that we'd have to invest in a larger oven. The capital to build a mold is pretty high. So you're looking for decent returns on that investment. You want to be able to advertise that tooling over as many hulls as possible and when you get to the bigger boats the volume and quantities just drop. So the smaller the boat usually the higher volume and it's easier to justify the toolings. There are folks in Australia that are building some larger boats of similar construction. But they're actually welding pieces together to get the larger size. It's not necessarily molding.

Let's talk a little bit about your advertising. You guys have definitely done some crazy stuff. Whose idea was your video campaign and what was the goal there?

Mark Welsh: The ad agency that we work with here in Durham, N.C. where we're based is The Republic, originally came up with idea of using viral video as a technique to spread information about our product and both to educate people but to do it in an entertaining way. We though that viral video would be the most cost effective mechanism for us to accomplish what we were trying to do which is really to draw attention to the product, educate people and entertain them at the same time.

Why don't you for the benefit of our listeners take folks through some of the viral video that you've put up and how they came together.

Welsh: We have a regular boat information product website under triumphboats.com. But then we also run a sister website called www.toughboats.com and that's where we host these viral videos. We started out by doing just some simple videos that we filmed ourselves here in the factory, so if you go out on www.toughboats.com you can find things like the sledge hammer test and the pendulum test. And these were tests conducted regularly in the factory. The sledge hammer test takes all of about 15 seconds to watch and it's pretty obvious what you're going to see.

The "Bubba Test" was really our first fully produced video that we went out and had a whole storyboard and a video crew and high def cameras and everything and went out on location to shoot that in Arkansas. One of the items in the storyboard was dragging the boat behind a pick up truck and slinging it into a tree. Before we got out there we actually had some of the guys from the factory tie the boat to the back of our company pickup truck and take it out into a field here in North Carolina and fling into a tree. You can see a small video that we made ourselves called "The Field Test."

Obviously the key here is that the boat survives every one of these, which is pretty amazing. Then you guys went farther, and farther, and farther. Tell us more about some of the other video you've done.

Welsh: The "Divine Intervention Test." That was filmed on site out in Arkansas. More, again, of a fully scripted storyboarded kind of video with professional videographers. We did a promotion last summer with the local minor league baseball team that a lot of people recognized because of the movie "Bull Durham." And we did a little exhibit with them and as part of that they said, "Hey, why don't we shoot a video. And wouldn't be fun to have the boat sitting in the stadium and have a pitcher throw fastballs at it." And so we did the fastball test. The toughness of the boats really lend themselves to lots of different fun opportunities.

And in "Divine Intervention" you actually hit the boat with a semi in that spot, didn't you?

Welsh: We did. We hit it with a semi and I was out there and we filmed it and I can tell you the guy driving the semi was almost more concerned about the boat hurting his semi than we were concerned about the boat being hurt by the semi.

How fast was it going?

Welsh: I would say on the order of about 25, 30 miles per hour.

And you've gone even farther and farther. You dropped the boat from a helicopter, and our personal favorite, is the cheaters video where you hooked it up to a crane and used it to demolish a trailer. Tell us who comes up with these ideas.

Welsh: A lot of collaboration between The Republic, our ad agency, and Triumph Boats' management team here and even the employees get involved in making suggestions about tests they'd like to see. We do have suggestions also that come in from the general public through our website, as well. The "Cheaters" video, part of the geneses of that was the ad agency coming to us and saying that some of the most searched terms on sites like YouTube that are hosting viral videos was cheaters, cheating wives, cheating husband, cheating spouses and so we thought well why don't we come up with a video that takes advantage of what people are already out there looking for.

Have you ever rejected an idea, I mean, found something that was so radical you just wouldn't do it?

Welsh: Pretty much anything that sounds overly dangerous where we're pretty sure someone's going to get hurt. And you'd be surprised we get a fair number of those that involve people wanting to take one of our boats and take out their anger and frustration with personal watercraft operators.

Have you ever actually acted on any of your reader suggestions?

Welsh: I'm not aware that we've actually taken a reader suggestion and developed a video around it.

Blaisdell: No. somebody had suggested it would be great to launch it off of a catapult on an aircraft carrier. Great idea, we would love to do it but the logistics are a little challenging. They're kind of busy doing other things rather than launching our boats.

One of the questions that just sort of pops into your head when you look at these videos is what is the breaking point here? What's the worst damage you've seen?

Blaisdell: You know, we have some great stories: We've hear of instances where someone is pulling a boat on a trailer and a driver wasn't paying attention and ends up T-boning the boat, and the boat gets knocked off the trailer and goes skidding down the highway and the vehicles that hit it gets totaled and, the guy has to go back and get the boat back on the trailer but aside from some scratches the boat's fine. You never get the opportunity to video those. It would be really compelling if we could. We did have a 30 foot center console hit one of our boats, our 21 foot boat at basically wide open throttle and you can see where the propeller marks go down the side of the boat. And it did take about a one foot chunk out of the gunnel of the boat. Now, there are many other boats out there that I think would have gotten cut in half or something much worse.

And as far as durability goes do you find that people stick with their Triumphs? If you've got a boat that that's durable do they ever buy new boats or trade up or do they tend to stick with them because they're so tough?

Welsh: We've got over 12,000 warranty registered boats in the field today. And it's not uncommon when we're out traveling in Florida or going out to see one of our dealers in the northeast or out west or in the Great Lakes region, wherever, to see some of these older boats. As George mentioned, the company started under the name Logic Marine and it's not uncommon to see an older Logic boat out there in the field. What we have found is our customers are exceptionally loyal to the product. I was just at a dealer this week and met a guy who was buying one of our new models, our 1700 Skiff, and it's going to be his fourth Triumph. People often buy a larger model or they buy a newer model to serve different needs that they have.

We have seen many multiple Triumph families where a father, son, uncle all own Triumphs because one of them bought one originally and the religion spread within the family. We've got a great owner community out there at www.triumphowners.net. It's a really terrific website that's run independent of our company by a very loyal owner. And one of the other things we find is quite interesting is because Triumphs hold their resale value so well and because they tend to be traded amongst people sort of in the know about the product, it's very rare to find one out in the marketplace like on a Craigslist or even a boat trader as a used product.