Knud Olsen

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Knud Olsen is a Danish builder and designer of boats.

Triplet sons, Torben, Bjørn and Knud Olsen were born in 1919 in Præstø, Denmark where their father worked as a carpenter. Torben went to sea and became a ship's master, and Bjørn and Knud were apprenticed as carpenters and joiners. However they preferred to build boats, and when in their 20's they started their own business by building the double-ended boat, "Vata". In 1941, only twenty-two years old, Knud Olsen entered a design in the competition for the new Folkboat, a design he called "Swan", and in 1943 he drew up the design for five different five-metre racing boats which the brothers built for a yacht agent from Copenhagen who had high expectations for the future of the five-metre class.

After the war it was almost impossible to obtain suitable materials in Denmark, so Knud and Bjørn gave up the boatyard at Præstø and went to Sweden to find work. A few years later, Knud returned to Præstø and resumed designing and building boats there. He built various types of boats, including motorboats and fishing dinghies, always with an eye to practical design; Olson boats had to be easy to sail and inexpensive to build. Knud quickly developed his own style, quite different from the expensive cutter-type sailing craft, with a long overhang and heavy demand for materials, that was currently in fashion.

During the 1950's he worked for A.P.Botved, who was producing speedboats in Vordingborg, about thirty kilometres west of Præstø, using veneers covered in fibreglass like the American boats of the time. Olson now had the opportunity to design boats in his spare time. The most significant of these designs was a 4.5-metre dinghy. It was never actually built, but when architect Axel Damgaard came back to Denmark in 1956, the design resurfaced and led to the world-famous OK Dinghy of which over 14,000 have been built.

The OK dinghy had fine sporting features, and it was both cheap and easy to build. The OK was a vehicle for an untold number of amateur sailors who would never have pursued recreational sailing if it had not been for Knud Olsen, and it was also a challenge for more experienced sailors.

Knud Olsen stayed with Botved until 1961 when he started his own business in an old corn warehouse near Bandholm harbor. In spite of building many boats, he couldn't make a living at it, because, as he said, "People came and asked if I had something they could sail, so I gave them an old design or a cheap one." For the same reason he was never really established among the famous designers and builders of the time, such as Utzon and Slaaby-Larsen. Nonetheless, many believe his designs were in the same class as his better-known contemporaries and drawn with an even greater emphasis on the practical aspects of boat-handling.

At Bandholm he began building a ten-metre square-sterned boat in mahogany, but he became quickly more interested in the possibilities of fibreglass. He was already familiar with that material from his days with Botved. The design became the Bandholm 26 which, together with Bianca 27 and Great Dane 28, built in association with the Nimbus brothers, were the first generation of Danish keelboats built primarily of fibreglass. Only the hull was fibreglass as Knud Olsen believed that the deck should be wooden to give the dinghy the right feel underfoot.

Later came the Bandholm 20 and Bandholm 30, which were superseded by the Mariboat at the start of the 1970's. The Bandholm 20 appeared later in a short-keeled version as the Bandholm 24, and for the first time Knud Olsen was able, as the license-holder, to make a living as a designer. When the Mariboat later had problems, he was forced to take up boatbuilding again, mostly doing simple jobs or refitting bigger boats.