History

In 1982 Revenge Yachts was founded. The mission at that time was to build a state of the art, next generation, custom sportfisherman. Included in the Revenge Yachts plan was the idea to engineer and construct the vessel from advanced composite materials. Materials that up until that time had only been used for exotic structures and military applications. Revenge also wanted to adapt the advanced computer modeling techniques and software that had just been developed. This software was being used at that time, to design the “Winged Keel”, on the Americas Cup challenger “Australia II”.
(In 1983 “Australia II” won the Americas Cup, and for the first time in 132 years, the cup left its place on the mantelpiece of the New York Yacht Club. The age of computer aided hull design was being born).

In 1987 Revenge Yachts constructed a complete composites testing facility. Drawing upon its state of the art design and engineering capabilities, Revenge started the construction of the first Revenge Yacht in 1988. The boat was completed in 1990. This was a 58' Carbon Fiber/epoxy Sportfisherman. Revenge used wet lay-up Epoxy Pre-impregnation, vacuum bagging, uni and bi-directional Carbon and Kevlar fabrics for the constrution. The interior structure and joinery was fabricated from Nomex honeycomb panels.

These early Revenge Yachts were extremely well received. To this day those boats are still the highest expression of Aerospace Composite technology in the sportfishing field. More than a decade later these boats are still with their original owners. That original 58, Sam and Jonathan Jennings "Revenge" is shown below.

Revenge Yachts 58

In 1996, while researching how Revenge might move to a higher level in the next generation of boats, Jonathan Sadowsky and David Jones came to the conclusion that technologically, the time was right to formulate a build process that would use advanced composite, high temperature oven cured, epoxy pre-pregs as its foundation.

This was a technology that was not adaptable to the marine field in the 1980’s. Materials research in the intervening years had led to new resin systems and components that appeared to be adaptable to marine use. One of the major stumbling blocks to using this type of construction in a production environment was the ability to use an in mold surface finish. Epoxy construction was always saddled with the issue of surface finish. To get a finish, long hours of hand labor to prep for paint were required. Paint was the only solution as there was no method for getting gelcoat to stick to epoxy much less survive an oven cycle. Funds were allocated for R&D to solve these issues, and within two years a workable solution was found.

From a production standpoint this is an industry first. Revenge has again broken new ground and raised the bar at a level far above the rest of the industry. Revenge Advanced Composites (RAC) is the only builder to have a workable production process for high temperature cured, Advanced Composite epoxy pre-pregs in the marine field. This is key core technology for Revenge, but it is the distant future technology for the rest of the boating industry.