Assa Abloy - the Stradivarius of Volvo Ocean 60s

Prior to her sailing through Tower Bridge we had a crawl round her

No fairing needed
Assa Abloy's most unique feature is her construction. Both Assa Abloy boats have been built in a set of female moulds. Nothing new here you might think - this is how Beneteau and all production builders do it and French yards such as Multiplast have been doing this with one-off race boats since the 1980s. All the French 60ft tris, boats for The Race and most of the Open 60s were built this way.

Carrington says the development lies in the quality of the female moulds. While French yards still need to fair their boats, the Assa Abloy yachts needed no fairing and thereby saved the weight of the fairing compound. They also saved the weight of the paint and primer - with the exception of her blue bow, Assa Abloy is unpainted save for a layer of clear lacquer topcoat. Carrington says that this saved them around 100kg in weight compared to a conventional male mould build. Being down when you are sailing is odd, he adds, because you can see the waves through the hull.

Magnus Olsen, Assa Abloy's Technical Director who has sailed four Whitbreads prior to this campaign feels that Green Marine was about the only boatyard prepared to take the risk of this meticulous type of construction. "A lot of boatbuilders said it was too big a risk. It is wonderful in theory, but in practice it is too risky." To get a perfect finish the moulds took a considerable amount of preparation. "It was two months before we actually started to build the boat," says Carrington. There was also much more attention to detail during the build. All the panels and furniture below were vacuum bagged. There are also several examples of fine detail work such as the chainplates which are composite and are built into the hull.

The hull itself was built using prepreg Kevlar (the EF boats were the only ones built with prepreg four years ago) with Coremat instead of Divinicell as a sandwich material. Coremat has only been allowed for the latest race and has the advantage that it does not have to be pre-cooked (this must be done to conventional PVC foams otherwise they gas preventing the fibre from bonding to it properly).

In total, build time for the two boats took 50,000 man hours. This compares to 16,000 man hours for Silk Cut. Shore manager Neal Graham says that usually when building female moulds for race boats it becomes cost effective if you need to build two boats. Such was the added expense of the Assa Abloy style of construction that, he says, they would have to build three boats to make it pay.