Dieter Loibner | Professional BoatBuilder Magazine Dan Kaseler, founder and president of foam-deck supplier Raptor Deck in Seattle, Washington, digitizes patterns from Mylar film to make a pattern for a custom job.
“We had no inkling of creating a business or anything. It was just a total fluke.” Dan Kaseler still chuckles when he relates the story that led him to start Raptor Deck in 2011. His company produces nonskid decking made of PEVA foam (a mixture of polyethylene and ethylene-vinyl acetate) backed with 3M adhesive. The firm operates a tidy shop at Shilshole Marine (Seattle, Washington) with a half-dozen employees, shipping CNC-cut kits to production builders and as an after-market product for retrofits and to individual boat owners. The company built relationships with dozens of domestic and international production and custom builders as well as marine supply stores; and it’s growing a library of decking patterns for hundreds of different boat models, plus all the one-off kits they have cut.
It’s a classic American startup story that includes dropping out of college and building something from scratch with sweat and ingenuity when a chance presented itself. Kaseler, 50, grew up on Bainbridge Island and studied mechanical engineering at the University of Washington. “I kick myself for stepping out of formal studies, but I was a square peg in a round hole. I really wanted to get on with building stuff, but in school I failed to find my way to a group or club that was doing stuff past the textbook work,” he said. Consequently, he joined the windsurfing and kiteboarding industry and held design jobs at Naish and Gaastra. In the process he also built a network of suppliers in Asia, where most of the materials and products originate.
Dieter Loibner Autometrix patterns on a computer screen are optimized for cutting on the CNC table.
The actual Raptor Deck story began with Kaseler making a frustrating trip to a marine supplier in search of nonskid decking for his Melges 24 to prepare to sail in the 2011 world championships in Corpus Christi, Texas. “I looked at the roll of sandpaper grip tape. It was like $100, but I didn’t have that kind of money at the time, so I went home to my garage, where I had a bunch of EVA foam.”
Dieter Loibner This detail being digitized from a Mylar pattern originated on the deck of a client’s boat.
It’s similar to the stuff that flip-flops are made of. Windsurfers and kiteboarders also use it as stomp pads because it’s grippy when it gets wet, and it cushions their feet when landing big jumps while pr venting boards from cracking or breaking on impact. “I pulled out this foam and I contact cemented the cockpit floor of my boat. It was pretty low quality stuff, but we were lounging around at the starting line, lying down on the bottom of the boat between starts. It was super comfy.”
When other competitors showed interest in this solution, Kaseler had five Melges 24 decking kits shipped from Thailand, but they proved difficult to sell. Then out of the blue, Harry Melges of Melges Performance Boats in Zenda, Wisconsin, called and asked Kaseler to come out and make deck patterns for all the models the company built at the time. Kaseler bought a ticket with cash and flew out the same day. Raptor Deck had its first OEM client, on what became a list of the who’s who of the industry.
Initially Kaseler had all the work done in Asia, from where the kits were shipped, but that model was not sustainable. He moved production stateside to control delivery time and product quality. In a small and competitive market, he has to keep some details confidential, but by and large, success depends more on product quality and customer service than on a magic sauce. “We use the best stuff we can get, but…we’re [also] working really hard on durability, UV stability, and [heat resistance] to 180°F [82.2°C].” The foam for Raptor Decks is blown to specifications by suppliers, but backing with a pressure-sens tive 3M adhesive, patterning, cutting, and packaging is handled in-house with digital tools including Rhino CAD and VCarve CNC software, and AI generation tools to create custom images, plus digitizing equipment and CNC machines.
Today, Raptor Deck works with multiple patterning methods, and 3D scans and 2D DXF (drawing e change format) files coming from the designer or the boatbuilder. Kaseler said such scans produce a “heavy point cloud” that must be “unrolled” to be used as a pattern. Photogrammetry is another tool, but its accuracy “is questionable,” he observed. Also accepted is a digitizing pen like ProLiner or Prodim, but working from Rhino or DXF files is preferred. However, it’s not a shoo-in, because “often things change in development, like added hinges or hatches, or a scupper that maybe wasn’t in the d sign,” Kaseler noted. He still praises old-fashioned templating with 7-mil Mylar film. “It’s low tech but can yield the tightest, most perfect fit [because] you can’t cheat. Film gets laid in the cockpit and this is how we get those [cut] lines into the computer,” he explained, pointing at the digitizing table.
Dieter Loibner Stacks of foam panels and rolls of Mylar film are close at hand in the Raptor Deck workshop.
PEVA foam, a synthetic product, has yet to find a second career after its useful life on a boat is over. “We’re generating scrap for the landfill, which we try to minimize,” Kaseler said. “But [foam decking] is not a single-use item; it has longevity.” The oldest kit in service has been on a TP 52 racing yacht for about 10 years. If a panel is damaged, replacement is a call away. Raptor Deck saves every digital pattern, so any piece can be cut and shipped quickly. Swapping out the old for the new often isn’t much more work than pulling off an old decal and sticking a new one in place, Kaseler said. Five to seven years of service life is the norm for these foam decks, but if users take care not to score or puncture them with sharp objects, they can last longer.
For CNC cutting, parts of different kits are nested on individually numbered sheets and are then sorted for packaging and shipping. Raptor Deck uses a custom-programmed nesting tool that runs inside Grasshopper, now part of Rhino. Kaseler and CAD lead Grant Lin cued up sample nests of decking parts for several models of one manufacturer that all had a specific color code. “Our panels have to nest with the grain orientation, [so] they can wiggle within a couple degrees and [the tool] will try that as part of the nest,” he explained. “We can give it a few different boats and tell it how many copies of each boat and push a button and walk away. It probably takes an older Mac about an hour [of computing] in the background, before it spits out a nest that’s super tight.” It’s possible to mix custom and OEM jobs, or to nest and cut jobs of one color—gray parts one day and mocha-colored the next. “The more puzzle pieces we have, the tighter we can pack them, so we produce less scrap and we’re throwing less in the dumpster,” Kaseler said.
Dieter Loibner CAD lead Grant Lin watches closely as the CNC machine finishes a custom decking panel he designed on his desktop computer from a screenshot of the ProBoat logo little more than an hour earlier.
For demonstration, he and Lin prepared a deck panel that bears this magazine’s logo. An hour later, after lunch, the job was just about done. As a final step, production manager Nick Andrewes did a final pass for quality control before rolling and boxing it for shipment. Clean, quick, and easy—not how it began 13 years ago, when Kaseler went to his garage to improvise with stomp padding to cover his boat deck.
Raptor Deck, 6317 Seaview Ave., NW, Seattle, WA 98107, USA, tel. 707–278–6749.
