ALL ABOUT REVIVAL BOATS
...BRINGING BACK 50 YEARS OF QUALITY BOAT BUILDING
Victorian boating icon, Sam Catanese's latest venture, Revival Boats, celebrates 10 years of building Australia's best value fibreglass all-rounders.
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The genesis of Revival boats traces back to the late 1950’s when a precocious 13-year-old, Sam Catanese, embarked on a boat-building apprenticeship that would spark a life-long obsession. As with many of his contemporaries, Sam honed his skills designing and crafting a diverse assortment of timber vessels including: House Boats, Cruisers, High Performance Ski Boats and even Hydroplane race boats.
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Upon completion of his apprenticeship, and following several years on his own repairing and maintaining power boats and yachts, Sam established the iconic Aussie brand, Stejcraft in 1971. A hands on artisan, Sam immersed himself in all facets of the boat-building process helping to pioneer the fledgling Australian fibreglass boat-building industry in the late '60s and early '70s.
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In 2008, after almost 40 years at the helm, Sam passed Stejcraft on to his son, Tim, and embarked on a very brief (3-month) retirement. As the wake of the GFC saw a tsunami of cheap used imports flood the local market, Sam was roused to take up a new challenge. By harnessing his substantial experience, he developed a versatile range of value-conscious inshore and offshore craft that would help turn the tide and “revive” the ailing local boat industry. And so, Revival Boats was launched.
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The 2018 model range comprises variants to cater to most boating experiences. From the compact R525 Series with its remarkable ride, to the blue-water-oriented R640 OffShore, the Revival fleet which now includes the R530, R580 and R590 Series, has resonated with Aussie boating families.
Revival currently builds around three (3) hulls per week in its Melbourne facility making it one of the most prolific manufacturers of fibreglass trailer boats in Australia. Each hull is painstakingly hand-crafted to exacting specifications and unlike many brand owners, Sam proudly has his hands (literally) on every hull produced in his factory.
Revival's guiding principal is to craft versatile boats for real-world boating families and each hull we hand-craft benefits from Sam's 60-plus years of boat-building expertise.
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IN THE BEGINNING...
Revival build modern hulls that blends time-proven traditional techniques with contemporary materials and styling. Sam Catanese is uncompromisingly old-school and still painstakingly shapes his prototypes by hand. Sam a wooden boat builder by trade as were many of his contemporaries back in the sixties and seventies. There was John Haines, the Spooners (Caribbean), the Whittleys, we all learnt our skills shaping timber boats and the end result was quality hulls that are still sought after on the second hand market. While CNC routers and CAD design are valuable tools, Sam's hands and eyes inform every new hull he designs.
Revival combines a spacious and flexible cockpit with enough creature comforts as standard fare to keep even the most jaded new boat buyer happy. We employ a robust composite-reinforced-timber-stringer system (CRTS). CRTS utilises a structurally-engineered marine-grade timber stringer system sheathed in a composite laminate of fibreglass and resin that is strategically bonded to both the hull and floor of every Revival (with the exception of the R590 Series). The nett result of all this effort is a soft riding hull that is super-stable at rest and sure footed in challenging conditions.
