At long last, I'm finally gonna post some photos & video from our tour of the Palm Coast Sea Ray manufacturing plant we took back in February when we were in Florida. When we were in Florida?!?!? The Sea Ray plant tour was the whole inspiration for the trip to begin with - I kid you not!
So, Mr. Harbour Master, here are the photos you requested.
Told you I was there;
This was so cool, the folks at the plant knew we were coming & had this welcome ready for us - that's 'Commodore Frankie & Anchor Girl', in case you can't read it through the Florida sunshine glare;
It was neat to see how all the components of the inside were put in place before the upper deck was installed;
Here we see the interior walls being put together. I was impressed to see that they built all the cabinetry and did all the upholstery right on site. I always figured they would bring those components in from outside suppliers.
No, I wasn't taking notes, just listening;
The engine bay with all the systems in place for a big Sundancer;
Here's the upper deck section ready to be 'married' to the hull in the previous picture;
A finished Sundancer, ready for final rigging;
This is Shawn Wilson, who was good enough to take us on a 1-1/2 tour of the ENTIRE plant. He is the guy to contact at Sea Ray for any technical support or insights, as he has been working with them for 25 years in the manufacturing side and can come up with part numbers by wrote & has an encyclopedic recall of the boats, hulls, engines and parts right down to special clips that hold down trim!
In this shot, Shawn was just looking back to make sure I wasn't taking any spy photos of hull #1 of the newest 450 Sedan Bridge (the current designation for our Boogaboo boat) before it reached the market;
This is the final station before the boats go in the water, where the boats are gone over by white clad specialists who make sure there are no scratches or other blemishes - including touching up the bottom coat paint.
Again, I was very impressed with the attention to detail and quality put into a mass production boat. I guess that's one reason that Sea Ray was able to weather the economic melt down in the US boating market, as well the support of long term, die hard Sea Ray owners like my wife ;-)
The last part of the process is an in water test of EVERY boat that they produce, complete with a Mercruiser technician dialing in the power plants. After that, it's a shake down cruise on Florida's Intracoastal (NOT 'Inter-Coastal) Waterway to make sure everything is ship-shape.
And yes, they actually pay people to do this kind of thing. Did I mention this is in Florida??
