LM sailboats: from Danish furniture works to canoe-stern motorsailers to wind-turbine giant
Long before LM Wind Power was supplying blades to turbines, LM built canoe-stern motorsailers in the small Danish town of Lunderskov — the last stop in a company history that started with wooden furniture, passed through camping trailers and speedboats, and only reached sailboats in 1969. LM's own accounts of its earliest years don't fully agree on the details, but the larger arc is clear: a mid-century Danish manufacturer that kept re-inventing what it built out of fiberglass, until the boats became a closed chapter and the wind-energy business absorbed everything else.
Origins and ownership
The company began in 1940 as Lunderskov Møbelfabrik, a wooden furniture factory in Lunderskov. LM Wind Power's own company history credits both Ejner Lorentzen and Aage Skouboe as co-founders that year; a separate archive built by the owners' club LM Klubben from LM Glasfiber's donated records instead holds that Lorentzen founded the firm alone, making wooden children's furniture, and brought Skouboe on as a hired carpenter around 1942, sharing ownership with him only afterward. The two accounts also disagree on when the founders' partnership ended: LM Wind Power dates a formal division into LM Camping and LM Glasfiber to 1953, with Skouboe leading the glass-fiber side; LM Klubben instead dates the actual split between the two men to 1972, after which Lorentzen ran the camping business a few more years before selling it. Both accounts agree the fiberglass side grew out of experiments the founders began in 1952. That work also produced roughly 300 LM Caravans — fiberglass-bodied trailers with carpentered wood interiors built jointly by the LM Camping and LM Glasfiber divisions, some of which reportedly remain in use — though in-house camping-trailer production ended in the late 1950s, when the company turned to importing caravans from England.
Boatbuilding began in 1954 with a small run of speedboats; Skouboe was reportedly already building them by the mid-1950s with help from Eli Andersen, founder of the appliance maker Diesella, as test pilot. Minor leisure boats followed, and in 1969 LM began the sailboat line the yard is now known for, operating from a new factory built on Rolles Møllevej in Lunderskov from 1965. By the mid-1970s, Flemming Skouboe — Aage's son — had taken over marketing and development and decided what LM Glasfiber would build next. Recreational-boat production continued into the mid-1990s, ending as the company pivoted fully to wind-turbine blades, a business it had quietly started as early as 1978, when LM cast its first blade — 4.5 meters long — from drawings by the boats' own designer, Bent Juul Andersen. Flemming Skouboe sold LM Glasfiber to Doughty Hanson in March 2001 for 2.4 billion Danish kroner; the company moved its headquarters to Kolding in 2008 and renamed itself LM Wind Power in 2010, keeping the LM initials, by its own account, as a tribute to its roots as LM Glasfiber. LM Klubben's tribute, on awarding Flemming Skouboe honorary membership in 2022, credits him with building LM Glasfiber into one of Scandinavia's largest and most successful boatyards. Much of what's known about that history survives because LM Wind Power handed over a substantial share of the old LM Glasfiber archive to LM Klubben in 2020 — more than 1,000 documents, many of them originals.
The designers
LM Klubben's archive says Palle Mortensen and Bent Juul Andersen are almost always credited as the designers behind the LM boats, with the finer decisions on how each one should look worked out at what the yard called "boat meetings" — a small group from sales, service, and production sitting down with the designers and owners to hash out the details. Model-by-model reviews split credit the same way: Mortensen drew the yard's earliest sailboats, including the 23 in the late sixties and the 27 in the early seventies, while Andersen is credited on most of what came later, including the 26, 28, 30, 32, and 81. Mortensen was awarded honorary membership in LM Klubben in 2017; when he died in 2022, he left a number of his original boat drawings to the club, which later digitized them and transferred the collection to Denmark's Museum for Pleasure Sailing in Svendborg for safekeeping.
Construction through the eras
The build recipe described across LM's model-by-model reviews stayed fairly consistent for most of the run: fiberglass hulls laid up by hand, decks built as a fiberglass sandwich that Yachtdatabase.com's reviewers credited with keeping the cabin's climate more comfortable, and ballast cast in iron or lead depending on which keel a given boat carried. Yachtsnet's brokerage archive traces the hull lines and rugged build of the LM 27 in particular back to traditional Scandinavian "Colin Archer" sailing lifeboats — a lineage that fits a yard whose earliest fiberglass work was for practical, working craft rather than yachts.
Lines and generations
Practical Sailor's used-boat coverage describes a family resemblance running through the range: canoe-stern hulls with a pilothouse set ahead of a sizable cockpit. The LM 27 carried that shape furthest — built from 1972 to 1986, it became, in LM Wind Power's own heritage account, Europe's most-produced motor sailor of its time, with more than 1,500 hulls built according to Yachtsnet's archive and a design credited to Palle Mortensen. After LM stopped building yachts, Practical Sailor reported that the tooling was sold on to an English company, ScanYachts, which turned out only two or three more hulls, one as recently as 2004 — a coda a UK brokerage archive corroborates, noting the molds "came to the UK when LM ceased building yachts." Later in the range, LM extended the same pilothouse concept into the smaller-volume Mermaid series, including the Mermaid 315, of which Yachtdatabase.com counts fewer than 100 built. At the margins, the LM 81 — an Andersen design — had only 53 built, all in 1984.
Who LM is for
LM suits a buyer drawn to Scandinavian-built motorsailers rather than out-and-out racers: canoe-stern hulls, a sheltered pilothouse, and, per Yachtsnet's brokerage archive, a reputation — at least for the LM 27 — as "probably the world's most successful small wheelhouse sailing cruiser." With around 5,000 LM boats built across the full range of sizes before production wound down in the mid-1990s, there's real depth to the used market for a brand whose builder no longer exists in boatbuilding form: every boat wearing the LM name was built inside a roughly 25-year window that closed when the company turned its full attention to wind energy.
