Now in their 10th year, Moore Brothers have grown to 45 employees as they completed the build of a ground-breaking prototype flying boat – while simultaneously taking on the marine industry innovations that originally earned them such a dependable reputation. In the past year alone, Moore Bros has delivered multiple successful orders for masts, rudders, and foils, as well as building tooling and mandrels.
They’ve also continued to build custom components, which is why the mini-maxi Bella Mente (main image above) keeps coming back. After adding twin rudders and the former 72-footer’s (extended to 74ft) first fully integrated water ballast system two years ago, Moore Bros helped the team continue their improvement by adding additional ballast tanks. ‘I work directly with the boat captain Peter “Pirate” Henderson,’ engineer and project manager Simon Day says, ‘to take their projects from conception through to reality.’
Concept brainstorming
This year, Day and Henderson have mapped out yet another upgrade, reducing fill and transfer rates in the ballast tanks. Instead of trying to describe the intricate inner design ballet of modifying custom plumbing in a six-yearold boat, Day zooms in on a 3D Rhino drawing until his latest concept fills the computer screen. As he rotates the model to show different perspectives, he points out that a straight pipe across the boat would be a serious head-banger – just ahead of the companionway.
‘I think we should put an angle in it to get it up against the underside of the deck,’ Henderson suggests. Before he’s even finished the thought, Day is already tapping the modification into his keyboard and soon they are both studying a 3D rendering of the proposed solution. Thanks to Day’s background in boatbuilding, the pair speak the same language. ‘Usually Pirate comes to me with a concept,’ the designer says. ‘We do a few rounds of modelling to sort out the details, which can take anywhere from a week to a couple of months depending on the complexity.’
Design and Build
Once they finalise the details, Day forwards the drawings to Moore Bros’ hands-on fabrication expert, Mark Raymond; he’ll also run it by the structural engineering expertise of Gunnar Salkind. ‘We have some pretty serious design horsepower,’ says Day. Thanks to their incredible growth over the past three years, they also have equally impressive capacity in sales, management, and production engineering.
‘After the design is finalised,’ Day continues, ‘Mark and I will detail all of the components, design the required tooling, and make construction drawings.’ While Moore Bros’ engineering team is capable of doing all the design work in-house, they sometimes lean on outside contractors when a client or project requires it.
Day’s work doesn’t end when the drawings are completed; the next step is to help the build team prioritise what to make first. ‘The components get built as drawings and tooling become available and then installed when they arrive to the yacht,’ he says. ‘I provide ongoing design support: installation drawings, templates, or jigs as required.’ But he doesn’t micromanage; ‘the final detailing is up to the team on the floor.’ For Bella Mente’s additional ballast tanks, he estimates that the entire process from concept to completed installation took about five months in total.
Continuous improvement
Bella Mente is always making upgrades, Henderson says; ‘Our team is constantly having discussions about what's next.’ For twin rudders, the idea had been batted around for quite a while before they committed to the change. ‘Once we decided to do the ballast project, it made sense to do it all at once because the aft tanks are built around the new rudders.’
That first pair of rudders were what Henderson describes as “Volvo 70” sized; subsequent designs have seen an area reduction. ‘We’ve built two sets of rudders plus a spare, all part of the ongoing development,’ says Day – before clarifying that Moore Bros had to subcontract out one of those sets, because ‘we just didn’t have the time.’
‘The pure sailing performance improvement has been huge,’ the boat captain says.
Shortly after the rudders and ballast were installed, Bella Mente showed off those performance improvements with a win at the Maxi Yacht Rolex Cup. Owner Hap Fauth quipped at the prize-giving, ‘Our boat had great speed – which compensated for my age!’ Less than a year later, the team posted another significant victory at the IMA Maxi European Championship. ‘She has legs is all I can say,’ her proud owner said.
Hap Fauth is constantly challenging his team to make improvements, Henderson explains. ‘He says, “If you’re not making the boat better, you're falling behind.”’
Along with improving the ballast system’s transfer rate, the boat captain and designer are also playing with rudder rake. In recent months Moore Brothers has modified all of the rudders to adjust their rake. ‘At certain angles, the single rudder could get quite loaded. Particularly reaching, the twin rudders are really nice. As we continue to develop the twin rudder setup, we are fine tuning the rake to find a happy medium with the helm load,’ Henderson adds.
Clockwise: 1| Wing fabrication for Regent Craft’s prototype seaglider. 2| One of five rudders – two sets plus a spare – for Bella Mente. 3| Stanchion installed aboard Bella Mente. 4| A new design of custom stanchions with integrated water ballast vents. 5| Dry fitting the lower assembly of Regent Craft's prototype wing. 6| Bella Mente’s new custom stanchions fabricated with precision in carbon fibre.
Turning ideas into working parts
Once the Bella Mente team commits to another upgrade, Henderson says that Moore Bros’ attention to detail is absolutely key to its success. ‘We have a performance group that discusses concepts and the development path,’ he explains. ‘Once the performance group makes the decision on the path forward, I become the conduit between our boatbuilding team and Moore Bros, and I jokingly give them a hard time; “guys, concepts are one thing, executing is another”. We coordinate all that together, then get it to work, and then go and test it.’
Moore Bros’ execution has been flawless, he adds. ‘When we did the ballast and the twin rudders, that was an insanely big change to the boat. And we only had one day of testing before the next regatta.’
On their practice day, ‘the first time the rudder loaded, we had a small interference where it passes through the hull; that had to come out and get trimmed up. That was it – and then we went out and raced the next day! That just doesn't normally happen.’
‘The other 72 teams keep a close eye on Bella Mente ’s modifications, as we do on theirs,’ he continues, ‘It's all the little details; there's just so much little stuff to get correct. The better you can execute on the front end, the less time you need to get the systems working correctly on the water and the faster you can develop the performance side.’
Now, after a final tweak to the new ballast tank piping on that computer screen, Day and Henderson are both nodding again; let’s try that. After other members of Moore Bros’ design team add any input, the pieces will be built in their 21,000-square-foot workshop and finally – with Day’s ongoing support and detailed problem-solving – installed by Bella Mente’s crew. Not long after that, it will likely be adopted by many of the trend-setting boat’s competitors.
After years of working on the Regent prototype, Day is enjoying this return to sailing projects. ‘Hopefully there will be other things coming for Regent down the road,’ he predicts, ‘but for now it’s nice to refocus on the marine industry.’
From the floor
Oliver and Sam Moore reflect on the growth of Moore Brothers Company
Moore Brothers’ most recent endeavour, the hull and wing of a full-scale prototype for Rhode Island based seaglider developer Regent Craft, was delivered last winter and will go on to see the company’s first crewed flight testing in 2025. Our largest project to date both in scale (a 55ft hull and 60ft wingspan) and complexity, the past three years have demanded a transformative level of growth… from the ground up.
Since our earliest conversations in 2021 surrounding their quarter-scale, to building the hull and wing of their first full-scale vessel, supplying Regent with production engineering support and composite fabrication of their prototypes has been a fruitful, invigorating, and particularly rewarding endeavour. Regent is constantly thinking about how to build composite seagliders at scale, so it was keen to explore how to fabricate the components fast enough. We have never backed away from a challenge and we’re proud that our core team has remained invested since the day we bit off such a large project, and risen to the challenge.
We learned valuable lessons while managing a project of that size; accepting iterations of designs, engineering and executing a structure with documented quality control, empowering our team with good information and resources, and building relationships with vital partners in various aspects of the job; Symmetrix, Lyman-Morse, Janicki, Ocean State Composites and Composite Approach among them. Finally, the decision to add a 30ft x 10ft x 4ft five-axis CNC machine to our collection of equipment brought our tooling and post processing up to the highest possible standard.
Recently we congratulated Regent on the ground-breaking of their 255,000sq ft manufacturing facility in North Kingstown, RI. It’s a critical step in their path to producing seagliders and transforming transportation for coastal communities around the globe.
Today Moore Brothers has grown into a company with the capacity to execute all phases of R&D projects, requiring fabrication of premier composite structures, from engineering to tooling and through to final part fit out. Whether it is a project for the marine, industrial or aerospace world, we are ready to take on the job and we can do it all in house.
