North America’s Largest and Most Advanced Dinghy Factory
Fulcrum Speedworks is a medium sized elite marine manufacturing company located in Rumford, Rhode island. It exists solely to build UFOs and Rockets; bringing foiling and sailing to the masses.
WHO WE ARE
While Fulcrum is a young company its roots are old. The boats were designed and developed by Steve Clark, President of Vanguard Sailboats 1987-2007, and his son Dave Clark, the president of Fulcrum Speedworks. Fulcrum is wholly owned and directed by Dave. Since it’s inception, Fulcrum has built a production team around industry veterans with multi-decade careers in the high-performance boatbuilding industry. Experience is an invaluable asset at every level of the boatbuilding profession. Fulcrum manufactures UFOs and Rockets in their entirety at their 17,000 square foot factory at 310 Bourne Avenue, Building 69, Rumford, RI. Stop by to see UFOs and Rockets being made.
THE CULTURE
Fulcrum is a future-focused company with a fanatical orientation towards continuous improvement. Getting slightly better at what we do every day is what gets our whole team going. Our job is to improve the process of how we make things by making things. Just take a look at our late 2017 walkthrough video and compare it to the 2019 walkthrough video to see the rate we improve year on year.
WHAT'S IT ALL FOR?
Safety, Quality, Price- in that order. Those are the three priorities of continuous improvement. We improve in order to 1. Make the job better for those who do the job. 2. Free up time and resources to assure more consistent and superior product quality with every step forward. 3. Control costs in the building process in order to deliver the maximum amount of value to our customers. If we were not focusing on a process of continuous improvement in order to excel in these ways we would be inevitably letting down the customer and ourselves.
And then there are giant steps like our silicone bag system, a major improvement we built in the year 2019. The system described in the below video drastically decreased the environmental footprint of the UFO build process, making it one of the greenest sailboats on earth. That matters.