The workshop

Everything Acme builds is built at 14 Pelican Quay, in a shed behind the counter. The company history is on About; this is what the building actually does.

What we make here

Two lines, and only two: Tidebreaker winches and Gullwing compasses. That is not modesty, it is the reason the Seven Seas Guarantee can be seven years — we will not warrant work we did not do. Everything else in the catalogue is bought in, and we say so on the shelf edge rather than letting the Acme name on the door imply otherwise.

Even within those two lines we do not pretend to make every part. We cast the bronze gypsies and the compass bowls, machine them, cut the gears, and assemble and test every unit. Motors, bearings and glass come from people who make those things better than we would. The line we draw is that anything which can fail and strand a boat is made and tested here.

The bait shed

The original shed the sisters started in still stands, now enclosed inside the warehouse that grew around it. We kept it because it is the quietest and most magnetically dead space on the quay, which makes it the only sensible place for the compass swing table — see Support for booking it. Its walls are the original tarred board and the roof leaks about once a decade.

Every unit is tested

Each Tidebreaker runs 200 lifts at full working load on the test rig before it is boxed, and the rig is in the corner of the workshop making a noise you can hear from the counter. Roughly one winch in forty fails that test and goes back to be stripped. Each Gullwing is swung on the table and its bowl left inverted for four days to prove the seal, which is why a compass ordered today is not a compass that ships tomorrow.

Parts, back to 1994

We keep the patterns and the tooling for every Tidebreaker since the 3000 series, and every Gullwing since the line started. A winch from 1994 can still be repaired here, and about a dozen of them come through each year. This is unglamorous and takes up an entire mezzanine, and it is the single thing customers thank us for most.

Can I look round?

Yes. Ask at the Acme counter during counter hours and somebody will walk you through the workshop, provided the rig is not running. We do not do this on Wednesdays, because the swing table is running and a person moving through the shed is a lump of iron that has no business being there.