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June 25, 2007

Down to size | Rob Eddy has made a career shrinking mega-yachts into handcrafted scale models

By Taylor Smith

Camden's Rob Eddy has built boats for some of the richest people in the world — guys like Jim Clark, the dot-com gazillionaire who founded Netscape, and Tom Perkins, a venture capitalist who helped found big-money Silicon Valley investment firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

And Eddy's boats aren't cheap. They cost hundreds of thousands of dollars apiece, and are carved by hand and covered in precious metals. And here's the kicker: They'll never touch a drop of water.

That's because his company, Robert H. Eddy & Associates, builds scale-replica models of boats, reproduced down to the very smallest design detail in miniature. Anchors are smaller than half a penny, and winches are crafted in gold. Hulls are carved from mahogany and basswood, and each mast and spar is shaped by hand. "They're 3-D pieces of art," Eddy explains.

Eddy recently completed one of the company's largest jobs to date, making a mini of Perkins' Maltese Falcon, a $100 million, 289-foot yacht that was launched last summer. Eddy shrank the massive three-masted Clipper to just 18 inches and spent thousands on a high-tech laser cutter to accurately reproduce tiny detailed sections of the yacht.

It was a big job for Eddy's small, four-person shop, which includes his daughter, Grace, and part-time employees Barb Goos and Rueben Brown. To nail the replica, Eddy took a 2005 recon trip to the Turkish shipyard building the big version of the yacht to take photos and plan his model. Once he got there and saw the size of the actual Maltese Falcon, Eddy wasn't sure it was a job he could handle. "I'm walking around this boat and it's 11 feet short of a football field," he says. "I had this lump in my throat thinking, 'What am I getting into here?'"

It was maybe the first twinge of self-doubt Eddy had experienced during his nearly 35-year career as a model shipbuilder. Even at 10 years old, when his mom gave him his first X-Acto carving set for Christmas, Rob Eddy knew he wanted to build model ships. He had two mentors around Camden, where he grew up and still lives, who encouraged him to apprentice with a jeweler to learn metalworking (he did) and in boatyards to understand marine design and construction (he did many times, from Rockport Marine to Lyman Morse in Thomaston).

His process for each model is derived from the training he received. Each model requires an on-site visit — a perk of the job, Eddy admits — where he gathers as much information about the project as he can. "I take literally hundreds of photographs of the boat and go through CAD drawings and put stuff on CDs," he says.

Then it's back to the shop, where Eddy begins the process of shrinking a mammoth yacht into a table-top piece of art. Though he typically takes on two to three projects a year, some models require special attention. The Maltese Falcon took 16 months and 2,150 hours to complete, but it also costs roughly $100,000. And a model of Jim Clark's $30 million sloop Hyperion is worth $200,000 in part because it required Eddy to take several trips to the Royal Huismen Shipyard in the Netherlands. "It was a very complicated model," he says.

These days, Eddy's company is booked two years out, and currently is working on a handful of projects including a scaled-down version of Windcrest, a 98-foot ketch built by Hodgdon Yachts in East Boothbay. (He landed that job thanks to a new brochure he designed over the winter with his daughter.) "I'm not going to get rich doing what I do," he says. "But we do the best we can, and we love what we do."

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