Aluminium top of the marine grade

Ullrich Aluminium supplies marine-grade aluminium sheets and manufacture extrusions to help build the best boats on the water. Boats range from tiny tinnies to serious deep-sea, ocean-going 70-foot vessels with boat builders ranging from small, one to three-man bands all the way to large boat building companies who have an entire production line with over 100 staff.

Praises aplenty for NZ boat builder

Our Bay of Plenty Branch in New Zealand has been working with New Zealand’s multi-award-winning aluminium boat manufacturer, Extreme Boats, for many years. Bay of Plenty Branch Manager, James Jordan, is extremely proud to be associated with them and has plenty of compliments to share.

James explains, “Extreme Boats’ workshop is an amazing sight to see. During a tour of their production line, you can see that every bit of the way the quality is checked and ensured, and each guy is responsible for the work that he’s doing before he hands it onto the next stage.  The innovation I’ve witnessed at Extreme Boats is outstanding. I’ve seen existing machinery repurposed, redesigned and re-engineered to suit a boat building purpose totally different from what it was originally intended to be used for.”

What do extreme boats like about Ullrich Aluminium?

Mat Cranswick from Extreme Boats describes their experience with Ullrich. “Extreme Boats finds Ullrich a great company to work with and through good management have been able to meet the ever-growing demand required to stay ahead of our increasing production. Recently, Extreme Boats have also established ‘Legacy Marine’ to build a line of high-end Sport Fishing Motor Yachts with drawings for 32, 45, 52 and 70-foot Sport Fishing Motor Yachts and a couple of exciting projects are already well underway. With plate thicknesses for these larger Sport Fishing Motor Yachts ranging from 4mm – 25mm, Ullrich has been able to meet our demands here also.”

Extreme Boats are New Zealand’s most awarded Aluminium Boat manufacturer, who has recently won the 2021 ‘Supreme Boat of the Show’ award at the prestigious Hutchwilco Boat Show for the fifth year in a row. Along with this award, Extreme Boats also won the hotly contested ‘Specialist Fishing Boat up to 8m’ with their 745 Walk Around as well as the 645 Centre Console also winning the ‘Specialist Fishing Boat up to 7m’ award.

From humble beginnings in a small shed on a rural property in New Zealand, Extreme Boats now have a worldwide dealer network. From New Zealand and Australia, they have expanded across the globe into Europe and the United States, where things have really taken off.

Ullrich produces extrusions locally in our Hamilton plant and mostly supplies Extreme Boats with marine aluminium plate ranging from 4mm to 8mm thickness, along with aluminium extrusions used for bow rails and handrails. The billeted frame is used in the Targa tops of their larger centre consoles.

Advantages of aluminium when building boats

James has been with Ullrich for twenty-seven years and has seen aluminium products evolve and become reinvigorated with newer and better alloys for fine-tuning. When it comes to using marine-grade aluminium for boat building, there are a huge amount of advantages over other materials such as fibreglass. Like all of us at Ullrich, James is a big aluminium fan, “Aluminium is light, strong, versatile, easily manufactured, has an exceptionally long life span and on top of all of that can be fully recycled. Old, outdated aluminium boats don’t end up in landfills and instead, can become part of a brand new boat.”

Building Partnerships

James continues, “At Ullrich, we are very customer friendly and like to look for innovative solutions to how we can build long-lasting relationships. Whether it’s forward-thinking to come up with a solution to a problem or a particular size of a product, or coming up with different ways of doing things such as sourcing new materials that we can offer into the marketplace. Our business survives on the back of how well our customers do.  It’s a partnership. We like to build relationships and we revel in it. We’re here for the long hall, having recently celebrated our 60th anniversary. I’m not the only one who’s been around for twenty-seven years and that says a lot about how a company looks after its employees. When given the opportunity for employees to really enjoy their job, they will transpose that over to their customers and how well they can look after them.”

If you’d like to speak with one of our friendly Ullrich team members for advice on the best type of boat aluminium and products to use to build your boat or ship, we have 50 branches throughout New Zealand and Australia so there’s a branch near you! Simply go to our NZ website here or Australian website here for our contact details.

Posted at 23 July 21