MetalBoatKits, established in 1997, is home to globally recognized boat designer Rick Welin. Rick is a member of SNAME (Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers), sworn in July 2002, and is a trade-certified boatbuilder in British Columbia.

Now semi-retired after three decades of design work, Rick has completed a diverse portfolio of projects—from custom designs for production builders, governments, military, police, rescue, and fire departments worldwide, to countless home builders working from his stock catalog. Over 2,000 boats have been built to his designs.

HISTORY: Rick currently lives and works from his office aboard his 50-foot steel trawler yacht, which he designed and built himself. His marine history runs deep. He started boating early in life, cruising the Pacific Northwest with his parents aboard plywood cabin cruisers in the 1960s. By age 7-8, he was helping his dad build dinghies, kayaks, and plywood runabouts in the family garage. Obsessed with boats and water (his mom called him “water baby”), Rick went on to build, and repair wood and fiberglass boats of his own before moving to metal construction. After a decade of professional metal boatbuilding at his own shop, Rick began designing and mentoring under recognized naval architects like John Simpson and Bruce Roberts. Through the 1990s, he brought computer lofting and CAD skills to an industry where this was completely new. His combination of building, fabricating, and CAD expertise proved invaluable.

WHERE DID THE NAME COME FROM? In 1993, the phrase “MetalBoatKits” didn’t exist—no one had done this before. (Now it’s a top Google search phrase.) When Rick needed a descriptive business name, he couldn’t find anything better. “Honestly, I thought it was a silly term. It was hard to spell and I had to explain what it meant to everyone.” The early years were challenging. Old-guard boatbuilders insisted, “You can’t build boats with a computer” and “every part has to be templated after the previous part or it won’t fit.” For the first ten years, only a handful of builders embraced this evolution—no one had even heard of CNC yet. It took time to prove the concept. Now, for the new generation of boatbuilders, it’s simply the way it’s done. If you believe in something, don’t give up!

THE TOOLS IN THOSE EARLY DAYS: Starting with only AutoCAD (purchased on 11 floppy discs in 1993!) and traditional hand-lofting on the shop floor, Rick would pick up the manually lofted lines and painstakingly enter them into AutoCAD, which only did 2D at the time. He realized the industry needed accurate 3D tools. Enter Rhino 3D, a fledgling company offering NURBS modeling. Rick joined the Rhino version 1 beta development forum, where naval architects collaborated to develop marine tools for the new application. Rhino is now an industry standard in marine design, but nothing affordable like it existed back then. On that forum, he also met Bruce Hays, who was developing Rhino plugin tools for naval architects and contributed groundbreaking ideas never before seen in marine design software. With these new tools in hand, MetalBoatKits was born—now able to model and analyze complex shapes beyond just hulls and reliably flatten complex parts for computer cutting. Today, all work is done with Rhino 3D and Bruce Hays’ Orca 3D plugin. We’re proud to have had a voice in that industry-changing development.