sea base catamaran /
truss build
client: Scouting America (Sea Base)
vessel: 45-foot Commercial Passenger Catamaran
status: Passed USCG Certificate of Inspection (COI)
Commercial operations push vessels to their absolute limits. When Scouting America's Sea Base program brought us in, their 45-foot catamaran required critical structural upgrades to maintain its USCG Certificate of Inspection (COI) after multiple fractured welds were identified on the hardtop frame.
We don't just grind out cracks and lay patches; we hunt down the root cause of the metal fatigue. Here is how we engineered a permanent solution.
Repairing fractured welds is the easy part; finding out why they cracked is the real job. During our initial load-testing, a light push on the frame revealed severe lateral racking. The hardtop on this catamaran is massive- 13'7" wide, 30'8" long, and a quarter-inch thick, weighing in at roughly 1,095 pounds. The factory Schedule 40 aluminum frame simply couldn't handle that much moving kinetic energy on its hinged front tubes. Simple corner gussets would have been a temporary band-aid; the physics demanded a structural redesign.
We engineered a custom structural truss to absorb and distribute the side-to-side load without altering the vessel's clean profile. We fabricated custom crowned sections to tuck the truss flush under the fiberglass top and we integrated heavy-duty inner truss legs to transfer the lateral energy directly down into the deck. It's an over-engineered, high-strength solution that looks as clean as it performs.
With the new truss in place, we locked the entire system down. We repair-welded the compromised factory legs behind the console and fused the rear hinge pins shut with structural welds to permanently eliminate the racking. The result is flawless rigidity, a passed USCG COI, and a commercial vessel built to survive the daily abuse of the fleet. Reality ended up looking even cleaner than our design proposal.
