Most boats come with hardware selected from a catalog. Van Dam boats come with hardware that didn’t exist before the boat did.
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Every metal component on a Van Dam custom wooden boat — every cleat, cutwater, exhaust tip, steering wheel hub, switch panel, bow rail, and name badge — is designed and fabricated in-house at Van Dam’s metal shop in Boyne City, Michigan. Not sourced, not adapted. Made from raw material, machined to the geometry the boat requires, hand-polished to a mirror finish, and fitted by hand.
The metal shop also accepts custom orders from outside Van Dam — for boat owners, other builders, and anyone who needs marine hardware that the catalog doesn’t carry.
Jewelry for Wooden Boats
The team calls their finest work jewelry — the intricate decorative and functional pieces that make a Van Dam instantly recognizable up close. The Art Deco-inspired Catnip name badge, machined in multiple stages and finished with a polished stainless surround. Custom steering wheel hubs with sculpted spokes. Gauge bezels. Vent grilles. Exhaust tips machined from 351-pound stainless billets, reduced over 85 hours of CNC work to sleek 29-pound sculptural elements with a geometric corner block pattern and mirror-like finish.
These pieces are not decorative afterthoughts. They are integral to the character of the boat — designed from the beginning as part of the visual language of the build, refined through the same iterative process as the hull form and the cockpit layout. Metal and wood are resolved together, not reconciled after the fact.
What the Shop Has Built: From Name Badges to In-Keel Fuel Tanks
The range of work that comes out of the Van Dam metal shop is wider than most people expect.
For Italmas — Van Dam’s 44-foot wooden sailboat — the metal shop fabricated an in-keel fuel tank with an engineering requirement that would challenge most dedicated fabrication shops. The tank needed to be strong enough to attach a 10,000-pound lead keel to the bottom of the boat while simultaneously holding 90 gallons of diesel fuel. It required a foil shape with internal bulkheads for both structural rigidity and hydrodynamic performance. Pieces were laser cut at the material supplier, then formed and TIG welded in-house to ensure total fuel tightness throughout.
For Italmas’s lifeline system, the shop solved a problem that annoys anyone who has ever looked closely at a production sailboat: the bulky, utilitarian turnbuckles that tension lifelines are both unsightly and exposed to damage. Van Dam’s solution was to hide the tensioning device inside the tubing of the bow pulpit entirely. Only a small access area remains visible for a wrench. The 316 stainless body is welded directly to the tubing and blended to a seamless finish. Silicon bronze and stainless were paired deliberately to eliminate any chance of thread galling — a failure mode that would make the tensioner unusable over time.
For custom boat trailers, the shop has fabricated complete transport solutions in TIG and MIG welded 6061 aluminium — stainless steel fasteners throughout, marine-grade wiring, electric winch with remote-controlled hydraulic guide posts, adjustable air bag suspension, and a remotely adjustable tongue for extreme ramp angles. A convertible canvas cover and aluminium belly pan complete the package.
The Custom Order Process: Concept to Mirror Finish
The Van Dam metal shop works with clients from the earliest stage of an idea through to final installation. The process is straightforward.
It starts with CNC machining. Van Dam’s craftsmen take a design — whether a client sketch, a CAD file, or a concept developed in collaboration with the team — and program it into the Haas VF4 CNC Vertical Machining Center. The machine mills the material to the specified geometry with precision tolerances. For complex shapes, multiple setups and custom programs are written for each part.
From there, the hardware is polished and buffed to a mirror finish. Stainless steel’s tendency to be sticky and abrasive during machining means that achieving a high-quality surface finish requires both the right abrasives and patient, skilled handwork. The Surefox passivating and electropolishing system is used to maximize corrosion resistance on finished stainless parts.
For pieces that mount to curved or compound surfaces — a hull, a deck, a pulpit tube — hand fitting follows. This is the step that separates marine hardware from automotive or industrial hardware: boats don’t have flat, square surfaces. Parts have to be individually fitted to the geometry of the specific boat they’re going onto.
What the Shop Can Make
The Van Dam metal shop’s capabilities cover the full range of custom marine hardware fabrication:
- Custom stainless steel and aluminium marine hardware — any quantity, from single pieces to low-volume production runs
- Highly polished fabrications and machined components
- Complete design concept to final part production — the shop can work from your idea or from a finished drawing
- CNC fabricated parts from the Haas VF4, with a 50″ x 20″ x 25″ envelope
- Artistic and decorative part production — emblems, badges, ornamental hardware
- TIG and MIG welding — certified welders on-site
- Plasma cutting, turning on the Clausing Colchester lathe, milling on the Bridgeport with 3-axis DRO
- Passivating and electropolishing via the Surefox system
- 75-ton press for forming operations
The shop works in 316 stainless steel, 6061 aluminium, silicon bronze, and other materials as required by the project.
Custom Orders: Not Just for Van Dam Boats
The Van Dam metal shop accepts custom fabrication orders from boat owners, other builders, and anyone who needs marine hardware that the standard catalog doesn’t carry.
This includes replacement hardware for classic and antique boats where original parts are no longer available, one-off custom pieces for production boats being upgraded or personalized, structural components requiring marine-grade welding and fabrication, and decorative hardware that needs to match an existing design language on a specific boat. If you have an idea and a need, contact Van Dam’s metal shop directly to discuss your project.