Ken Hankinson Transplanted Californian Source For Build-It-Yourself Boat Designs

Ken Hankinson doesn’t build the dreams of boat lovers, but he makes darn sure that boat lovers can do it themselves.

From his cozy office in his home here, Hankinson has at his fingertips the blueprints for an armada of boats: aluminum powerboats, wooden sailboats, huge ocean-going behemoths.

“We put a lot of people in the boat-building business,” Hankinson said. “It gets in their blood.”

With his four associates, Hankinson sells an array of do-it-yourself boat designs as Hankinson & Associates. After more than 25 years of bringing boats to life on paper in Southern California, Hankinson wanted a change.

Needing only a phone, a FAX machine and a reliable overnight service to run his business, he settled in North Idaho in 1992.

“I just couldn’t stand the climate down there,” he said of California. “Our house was broken into three times, and it was in a pretty nice neighborhood.”

People from across the country and the world dial Hankinson up, looking to find the perfect craft to quench their seafaring or freshwater thirst.

The challenge is to give customers a design that clearly shows each step needed to create a boat. He has to imagine himself in the garage or shop where a boat is taking shape and ask if the design he’s made makes sense.

“You can’t gloss over anything,” said Hankinson, whose been penciling out boat hulls on design boards for 33 years. “Everything has to be perfectly clear.”

Despite having sold thousands of designs, he receives few calls from people puzzled over aspects of the blueprints. That, he said, is what he’s aiming for.

The trend Hankinson sees in amateur boat building is smaller boats, and more aluminum boats. The days of building huge pleasure crafts to sail to, say, Tahiti are over, he said.

“Those kinds of boaters have just worn out their welcome,” he said. “If you want to dock in Tahiti today, it’ll cost you, and you better be out of there when they say.”

Hankinson also does custom designs for people around the world, particularly for Asian clients. He picks his custom clients carefully, judging how interested he’d be in the boat design itself and how easy the customer - who can be somewhat eccentric - is to work with.

Most of Hankinson’s business comes from outside the Northwest, but being here has some advantages, he said. As the popularity of welded aluminum boat building grows, the region has become a leader in how the materials to build the boats are produced and in how they’re put together.

“The rest of the country will catch up, but we’re far ahead of them,” he said. The popularity of river-running and fishing boats makes sturdy but lightweight aluminum a good choice.

Hankinson’s boat designs cost between $25 and $3,000, though “there’s not a whole lot of money to be made in this business,” he said. “But I suppose I am a big fish in a very small pond.”

New clients find Hankinson mostly through word-of-mouth, though his firm does advertise in trade magazines. Often he gets referrals from Internet chat rooms devoted to boat building.

Drawn to boat design from his earliest days, Hankinson worked at several boat design companies in Southern California before deciding to try it on his own.

Despite spending much of his time figuring the curves of hulls and rudders, he doesn’t own a boat himself, nor does he relish being out on the open water.

“It’s really the boat itself that I’m interested in,” he said. “It’s great to be out there on the water testing the boat, but after a while…”

As for hobbies, the 54-year-old Hankinson likes to “ride his Yamaha,” that being his Yamaha grand piano just a room over from his office. “It relieves tension for me.”

And as for a boat of his own, Hankinson is “looking for the right design. And I want someone else to build it for me.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo