story by Brett
Bayne
FACTORY TOUR
Speedboat heads to Bradenton, FL, to tour the legendary 47-year-old trailer manufacturer’s factory.
T
he performance boating industry has seen a great deal of companies come and go over the years, but one constant element is
MYCO Trailers. Whether it’s a state-ofthe-art model or a decades-old relic, it’s practically guaranteed to have sat atop a MYCO trailer. The firm launched in 1974, during the Nixon administration. Since then, MYCO has become the world leader in custom, all-welded boat trailers—each designed around the boat by the company’s mechanical engineers to forge the most precise-fitting and best-towing trailers in the industry. In the fast-boat industry
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S P E E D B O A T | June 2021
alone, MYCO has been an OEM supplier for MTI, Mystic, Nor-Tech, Outerlimits, Cigarette, Apache, Sutphen, DCB, Skater, Fountain, Donzi, Baja, Eliminator, Sunsation, Cougar, Statement and numerous others. Even the U.S. military has MYCO build its very specialized trailers for assault boats. MYCO custom-built products are built in Bradenton, FL, where the company principals oversee production: President Price Taylor, engineer Don King, and the sales and marketing team of Ronnie Moran and Jon Smiley (who took over longtime employee Bill Tweedie’s duties when he retired last year). Together, the team keeps the production moving at a
Above left: MYCO President Price Taylor, engineer Don King, Sales VP Ronnie Moran and Sales & Marketing Manager Jon Smiley Above: King working on an oversized gooseneck trailer design. brisk clip, with sales figures steadily on the increase year after year. The factory floor looks like fabrication plants everywhere—trailers in staggered levels of assembly, welding going on in various places, grinding in others, and workers coming and going with parts. The next area that sets MYCO trailers apart from the crowd is its elaborate parts room. Most trailers are delivered with torsion suspension axles, LED lights, sealed bearings and hydraulic disk brakes; even the brake lines are made from the best stainless steel tubing money can buy, and are connected with double flare fittings—no compression fittings allowed. Then there’s the elaborate paint booth. speedboat.com
