Some of these details are just a consequence of thinking about it long enough, but don't really cost that much to build. A lot of it I have stolen from one place or another, and just brought it all together in one place. On a production boat it seems certainly worthwhile to think this stuff all through, every customer benefits. On a custom, there is a limit as to how much design work, thought, proof mockups etc., can be done. I'm sure I have a lot more design work in my boat than the designer. Not to take anything away from him, he did his job very well - but to try to work to perfection each detail is tremendously time consuming. I have made hundreds of drawings of the dinghy garage and transom door for example, modeled it all in 3D, and eventually bought the dinghy and built a full sized mockup to test it. From this effort a lot of things were changed, and it works. You are not going to get that in even a normal custom build. One of the consequences is cost: I have a bit over 40,000 billed hours, not counting my time, in the boat. It has cost at least 5 times what a high end production boat cost, and maybe 3 times what a 'normal' custom would. Economically it is a disaster, if I ever sell her I will get only a small fraction of the money invested. Much of this is my unwillingness to compromise on quality in any detail. For example it is a cored hull, if not carefully done this can be a nightmare down the road. So the builders were not allowed to drill through or put even one screw through the core, inside or out. Anytime a hole was made, it was decored and filled, in most cases that require lots of holes (like fastening wiring bundles for example) tapped G10 blocks were bonded to the surface rather than penetrate the skin. This kind of attention to detail was insisted on throughout, most of it will never be seen. Another trivial example: the solar cells would normally be fastened with self tapping sheet metal screws through the deck skin. If you are lucky, the installer would use a bit of silicone. For mine, I machined tapped G10 inserts, these were bonded into potted holes in the deck skin, and SS machine screws used to fasten them.

Here is some more hardware. The mast is rotating and unstayed, so the step must hold a heel bearing and resist about 20,000 lbs shear with a safety factor of 4 or 5. To do this I machined an aluminum base from 6013:

This has a 5" diameter tapered stud that engages a matching taper hole in a block of G10 that is 3" thick. The taper is designed to be about a 0.001 interference fit so that no motion will occur (and, for safety's sake, twelve 5/8" SS bolts). I could not use a tapered fit on the bearing (which is from the rudder of a 747), so this was precision fit with about 0.0002 clearance. Here is the hard anodized base in the G10 block:

Of course any proper yacht should have a coin under the mainmast step, so a pocket is machined underneath for a gold American Eagle coin (couldn't afford a bigger one!). The block is held into the boat with sixteen 5/8" K500 Monel studs with a tested strength of 130,000 psi. No dissimilar metals touch. The large hex washers where waterjet cut and tacked to the bolts to provide good bearing on the G10 and keep them from turning since the heads are blind during assembly: