VanDerHeijden Steelyachts 
VanDerHeijden Steelyachts is a small shipyard from the Netherlands specialising in the construction of luxury steel yachts. Founded in 1993, the yard has delivered over 200 yachts from a range of standard hull series designed by external designers. In recent years, an increasing number of prospective customers have been requesting custom design hulls, and so VDH made the decision to introduce an in-house design department and implement the Maxsurf suite for vessel design and ShipConstructor for vessel detailing. Not only does this enable the yard to sell into a bigger market, it also creates the opportunity to change over to more efficient building practices and increase product quality.
 |
Maxsurf’s developable surface function is used to accurately model the hull so that it can be built from 100% developable plate. Workshop is used to develop the plate and calculate any regions where strain occurs. The plate parts are exported to ShipConstructor from where they are detailed and nested. The nests are then exported to NC files, which can be directly sent to the plasma cutting machine at VanDerHeijden. A high degree of developability of the hull plates allows VanDerHeijden to save cost on plate forming equipment and production resources. The Maxsurf/ShipConstructor combination helps them deliver highly accurate work packages to the shop floor, ready for assembly and with an absolute minimum of rework.
 |
Recently
VanDerHeijden started construction of a newly designed yacht with a
flared bow. The plates in the bow region are divided up in such way
that the strain in each of the plates is within the yard’s practical
bending limits.
Maxsurf and ShipConstructor have allowed VanDerHeijden to completely
review their building process; the existing practice was to start with
the keel and hull plate and then, using a trial and error method, bend
the transverse stiffeners and fit them to the hull plate. After
introducing Maxsurf and ShipConstructor, VanDerHeijden is now able to
reverse the building process; frames and longitudinals first, and then
simply fold the hull plates along the framework. With this approach,
parts no longer require any bending. This saves a significant amount of
time and is made possible by highly accurate production information
directly derived from the 3D model.
 |
More information on VanDerHeijden Steelyachts can be found at
http://www.vanderheijdensteelyachts.nl/
