From the smallest to the largest foresail furler or cylinder, the brand is always the same in all the sailboats of the best brands in the world. We are talking about Bamar, a reference company in the field of design and production of boom furlers, jib furlers, RLG-CODE, EVO options, hydraulic cylinders, deck equipment, mainsail furlers and captive winches. “A wide range of products designed to suit any type of boat, from 25-foot sailing yachts to the largest boat in the world, and that’s not a figure of speech,” says Francesco Tamburini, Italy Sales Manager at Bamar. “The largest sailing yacht in the world we are talking about is in the Sailing Yacht A of Russian oligarch Andrey Melnichenko, whose three 90m+ masts are held together and handled precisely by Bamar, which made the furling booms, the kicking straps, the boom handling control cylinders, the mainsail trusts and the captive winch for the halyard and mainsheet.”
All the handling of Sailing Yacht A‘s three furling mainsails, which are tied to Bamar’s structure, are technically and literally the largest objects ever made in the world in this field. “Each of the kicking straps is almost 7 metres long and have cyclopean features, dare I say it,” continues Mr. Tamburini, highlighting the capabilities of a leading all-Italian company in the production of sailing equipment for yachts of all sizes. “Milyus and Solaris, for example, have Bamar furling systems as standard,” the sales manager points out.
A multi-faceted, dynamic and international company, Bamar has a plant of 18,000 m2 including a mechanical workshop in Villa Selva, in the province of Forlì, where it moved in 2010 following a real commercial explosion of the company, which does not only produce for the boating industry but also offers its “mechanical solutions” to other sectors, to quote the company payoff. “Bamar has evolved over the years,” explains Mr. Tamburini, “and especially in the last decade it has become more structured, putting all the know-how accumulated over forty years of experience to good use. The growth has taken place with the expansion of a range of numerical control machines that work for the industry on behalf of third parties, while for the boating sector we work on products that we design, plan and market directly”.
The company’s structure guarantees a perfect synergy between production and warehousing, with a solution that speeds up the production process and product assembly, control and shipping. From mass to custom production, the distance is therefore short: “All our furling systems have their own design and standard,” Mr. Tamburini explains. “But when the size of sailboats increases and go beyond 80, 90 and even 100 feet and more, the number of products can obviously be counted on the tips of one hand, which is why they are custom-made and actually built for the customer’s needs. So, inevitably, some items become unique in their functionality, because we are able to build them and we have the skills and machinery to do so, as well as the technical, physical and economic capabilities”.
The secret lies in what Francesco Tamburini calls a ‘double speed‘: “The 30-footer customer who buys his small manual furling system knows that he is buying an extremely sturdy and durable item, but what he doesn’t know is that this item is made by the same machines that make equipment for superyachts. This is what I mean when I talk about technical, physical and economic capabilities”. At Bamar, then, the attention to detail is in every component, even in the most trivial details that are built from solid, which is in no way obvious: “Many use other methods such as casting or plastic moulding, but this is our signature: we create an essentially eternal product”.
Bamar’s flagship product is the entire range of manual furlers, which are widely used. “The best sellers in the range are undoubtedly the Sfera electric furlers: they are flanged components on the deck and enjoy a self-alignment dictated by a spherical steel fulcrum, which works on a spherical female piece and from which the furler starts. The motor is suspended below this sphere and transmits the rotation to the profiles. It is low on the deck line and makes the bow watertight, something that is now necessary on modern boats. There are only two companies in the world that produce this kind of products, and we can say that ours have something extra”. What is this something extra? “We only do what our customers expect, which is that the product lasts over time and that it works with a surplus: as the performance of boats increases, our products must also have the expected performance. I can’t imagine building a product that works at 80-90% of its performance. Bamar manufactures components that work at half of their potential in order to have a greater margin when an extra is needed, and owners and captains know they can count on that. We’re a performance-oriented company, but we’re always ready to help at any corner of the world.
Not surprisingly, the geographical location of the Bamar network covers the entire Italian territory and extends, through strategic sales and service points, all over the world. A comprehensive service that starts from the customer’s simple request and ends with the finished product, covering all the needs of sails and their equipment. In short, Bamar is the real guarantee of Made in Italy experience and know-how that, once again, is expressed in the boating industry as in few other sectors.
