Andy McCutcheon100 Years of Wooden Glory - Van Dam Woodcraft
September 6th 2007 11:31
Impshi II
Van Dam Wood Craft
Steve Van Dam personifies old world craftsmanship married with new world technologies and his workmanship combined with available modern technologies has enabled him to preserve and improve designs of the golden age of boat building.
Van Dam, who hails from western Michigan in the United States, lives in an area that was predominantly settled by Dutch immigrants. Of Dutch ancestry himself, Steve was always taught that if you work hard you’ll succeed and achieve whatever goals you set.
This work ethic is evident in every facet of both his professional and personal life alongside a penchant for neatness order and quality. “If I’m going to do something, I want to do it the very best I can. I don’t have a desire to be mediocre, and I don’t like to do things twice; I like to do the job right the first time.”
In modeling the basis of his company after this traditional work ethic, Steve admits to encouraging the same standards in his employees and that often means he has to be willing to invest the time it takes for each employee to get a particular job done correctly and not rushing them in an effort to increase productivity.
This has resulted in a low turnover, intense dedication to the business and craft of building yachts, with a high level of self-discipline that is extremely rare in today’s workplace. Employees of Van Dam Wood Craft mirror the old world craftsmanship and work ethic of its owner and as a result, produce the highest quality products that carry as much pride for their new owner as they do for the people who have built them.
Steve Van Dam grew up in the land locked town of Grand Rapids Michigan and was drawn to boats and boating at an early age. As a young boy of ten, his Father and brother Dave restored a small Crescent day sailer and kept it at a family friend’s beach on Lake Macatawa near Lake Michigan in exchange for maintaining their waterfront property and that was really the turning point in what would be Steve’s lifelong love affair with wooden boats.
As a teenager, Steve suffered from the same wanderlust that afflicts most kids that age to some degree and during the latter years of high school, Steve was keen on finding some kind of boat he could buy, fix up and sail away on. Like many of us, he was enamoured with the idea of casting off the lines and sailing off around the world – or at the very least on some extended voyage.
While Steve admits to still having that urge to pack up and sail away, he is also quick to point out that he has reached a point in his business now that has become infinitely more interesting and he enjoys the challenges that each day brings in the design and construction of some pretty unique boats and as he has gotten older, he has realized that an adventure of that magnitude would probably bore him now.
In 1969, Steve had ventured on the Outward Bound program on Maine’s Hurricane Island for four weeks of boats, survival training and inward reflection, but with the Vietnam war in progress the “Uncle Sam” was fast on his heels, so he enrolled at the University of Central Michigan for an intensive industrial program that gave Steve his first exposure to and formal training in woodworking.
Following Steve’s first term at University, his older brother Jim had purchased an ageing 36’ cutter rigged sailboat built originally by the Burr Brothers in Massachusetts. Much of the boat had suffered hull rot and was in need of replacement, but the boat came with plenty of nice equipment. Steve began rebuilding the boat for his brother while he attended school, replacing many of the wooden planks, cabin and backbone and when complete, Steve acted as charter captain for the boat during his summer holidays.
Steve’s second year at university ended up being his last in formal education and at the time justified his leaving school by the overwhelming sense that he was going nowhere. “I am the kind of person that needs a goal and I just didn’t find that at school.”
It ended up being a combination of interests that has gotten Steve to where he is today and his enjoyment of woodworking in combination with his affinity for boats seemed like an interesting and rewarding pursuit with a natural connection.
By the summer of 1971 Steve had met his future wife and business partner Jean, but despite their budding relationship, he left his home state of Michigan for Florida, in hopes of securing a berth crewing on a boat. In those days as they are today, finding crewing positions are difficult to come by unless you know someone, so Steve accepted a position with Wind Jammer Cruises, converting a 280’ four-masted steel ship into a cruise ship.
He was relegated to the bilges partitioning off the vast interior volumes into compartmentalized cabins, but working with steel studs quickly lost its appeal and with Jean still back in Michigan he soon returned to familiar territory – and to Jean.
Returning to Michigan he was jobless at first, but convinced his brother Jim to cover his costs and living expenses while he completed the restoration of the cutter.
Still self taught at this point, Steve was acutely aware that he needed to further his training if he was going to pursue boat building as a career and sought out to find a boat builder to work for in an attempt to get official recognition of his efforts in an apprenticeship that would augment his self taught boat building skills.
Steve found that boat builder in Ted McCutcheon who at the time in 1971 was building small fibreglass runabouts. McCutcheon would later go on to build a 55’ replica of the British war sloop “Welcome” for the Michigan State Park Commission but his relationship with Steve Van Dam lasted long enough for Steve to realize that he hated working with fibreglass.
In 1972 Steve and Jean were married and honeymooned in coastal Maine, with an ulterior motive to find a traditional boat builder whom Steve could complete an apprenticeship with. After traveling the entire Maine coast and enquiring at all the boat yards, there was only one yard that was willing to take Steve on - it wouldn’t be until the following year – and only if they had the work. Things didn’t sound promising at that point and Steve and Jeans return to Michigan was a trip filled with soul searching.
Steve spent the summer chartering his brother’s boat again in addition to working odd jobs to pay the bills and by the autumn of 1972, he and Jean packed everything they owned into their Ford van and headed east towards Maine to the only glimmer of light in what must have seemed like a very long dark tunnel.
Enroute to Maine through Canada, Steve and Jean decided to look up boat builder Vic Carpenter in Port McNicholl, Ontario. After a brief meeting with Carpenter, Steve was offered a job and he and Jean made the decision to spend the next three years in Port McNicholl – a turning point in Steve’s career.
In addition to obtaining his apprenticeship skills through Vic, Steve would take away some very valuable transferable skills that would stand him in good stead when making the transition to his own business.
When he finally left Vic Carpenter, Steve worked building a couple of houses with Jack Haste, an English immigrant who also lived in Ontario, learning some valuable skills in the area of cabinetmaking.
The thought of owning his own business and combining the skills he had acquired over the past few years haunted Steve and in the spring of 1976, Steve and Jean returned to Michigan. With $1500.00 in their pockets they purchased a mobile home on credit and stuck it on a vacant five acre block outside of town.
Steve got a job as a carpenter for a local contractor and in his spare time began the task of clearing their land for his first boatshed. One year later with the 24’x36’ shed nearly complete, Steve accepted a commission to build a home for a friend’s mother and at 26, you tend to know it all – but as Steve admits, “the older I get the more I recall – how little I knew, when I knew it all.”
Nonetheless, the blind youthful exuberance that leads most of us to do things we wouldn’t normally contemplate doing in middle age – is also quite often the needed impetus allowing us to mitigate risk and accomplish great things – and so was the case with Steve.
The contract to build the house was the beginning of self employment for Steve and he has never looked back since. His first boat related project came in the form of a rebuild to the interior of a 54’ Palmer Johnson motor-sailer located in Cheboygan and given the 40 mile commute, Steve prefabricated many of the component parts in his shop, installing them onsite throughout the winter months.
Over the next few years, the Van Dam yard was busy with a variety of boat repair work and restorations with a few custom cabinetmaking jobs. One such job involved the remodeling of a local restaurant that had burned to the ground and was being rebuilt.
The owner who was over capitalized on the project, found himself in financial difficulty and as such Van Dam only released as much furniture to the owner as he could pay for in cash – ultimately as Steve recounts, “I was the only contractor to get paid out on that job, everyone else lost a lot of money” and goes on to say, “I learned a valuable lesson on that job and when you are in business, you can’t ignore the financial aspect of your craft – no cash, no splash” as they say in the boat business.
By the late 1970’s Van Dam had built his own boat, a 24’ sailboat designed by his old mentor Vic Carpenter that eventually led to the commissioning of a 30’ Henry Scheel design, canoe stern sailboat crafted using cold moulding.
From there business began to snowball as exacting attention to detail began what would become Van Dams hallmark in modern boat building. A meeting with boat designer Fred Ford resulted in the building of a further two sailboats, one for him and one for his daughter and as time went on, Van Dam would build five boats in total for Fred Ford and his family – due largely to the designers confidence in Steve’s ability to produce perfect boats.
By the early 1980’s Van Dam began building 1920’s styled gentleman’s racers and the Fred Ford designed “Flicker” was definitely an inspiration from the ghost of John L. Hacker which, like his original commissioning led to further work along those same lines.
Bob Fergus sought the genius of Van Dam in replicating the 1924/1925 Gold Cup winner “Baby Bootlegger” and brought to him a set of drawings so distorted from reproduction that it was almost indistinguishable and better to start from scratch.
Shortly after the start of the project, owner and restorer of the original Baby Bootlegger stopped by the shop and after some discussion a deal was made to acquire a set of drawings.
When the plans were studied and actual measurements, lofted lines and scantlings for the boat were compared against the original, what Steve had come up with for Bob Fergus’ boat In the absence of anything to really work from, were very nearly the exact dimensions of the original boat – with of course some variation in consideration of the cold moulding technique he was using.
In 1991 a marine development company’s bankruptcy resulted in the opportunity for expansion into larger premises for the Van Dam yard that would also provide the added convenience of deepwater access, making repair work of both wood and fibreglass boats possible.
The site worked well on so many levels and while Steve’s custom fabrication shop has always done a steady business, he began to worry that if that end of the business tapered off, he could be in trouble.
The new site, in addition to a 16,000 sq. ft. insulated building facility, also housed some larger out buildings suitable for a growing storage business, a 35 Tonne travelift and 15 acres of commercial development property that would accommodate considerable expansion of the business in the future.
In the spring of 2005, young Ben Van Dam who had grown up in his father's shop since he was old enough to walk, recently graduated from the University of Michigan with a degree in Naval Architecture.
During the summer of his junior year at school, Ben took the opportunity to take advantage of an internship in New Zealand with well known Architect Brett Bakewell-White and gained invaluable experience with a world class yacht design firm and in his senior year, Ben and his two mates won first place in the International Small Craft Design competition sponsored by the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers.
Ben is now back at the shop under the watchful eye of father Steve, who will ensure his son gains the needed practical experience to round out his recently acquired degree.
The future continues to look bright for Van Dam Wood Craft and a future benchmark is already in place to ensure that the art and craftsmanship of building classically styled boats will live on for at least another generation.
Andy McCutcheon, 100 Years of Wooden Glory. Copyright 2006
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