Brunvoll Brand Guidelines: A 1912 Harøya Engine Workshop Turned Molde Thruster Maker

Two brothers, an island and a semi-diesel engine.

Brunvoll began on the island of Harøya, on the Romsdal coast of western Norway, in 1912. Store norske leksikon, the Norwegian national encyclopedia, and the company’s own history agree that the brothers Andreas and Anders Brunvoll founded Brødr. Brunvoll Motorfabrikk that year to make low-pressure diesel engines and controllable-pitch propellers for fishing boats.

The company places its start in a wider movement. In the early 1900s, it says, Norwegian fishing was moving from oars and sail to engines, and young men went to learn engine-building from one of the country’s pioneers in diesel engines before going home to set up workshops of their own; at most there were about 50 engine factories in Møre og Romsdal. Brunvoll was founded in 1912 and another such workshop, Volda Mekaniske Verksted, in 1913.

In 1918 the brothers bought Jens Engstrup’s engine factory at the mouth of the Moldeelva river and moved the business into Molde, where a third brother, Arthur Brunvoll, joined as an equal partner, both sources say. Brunvoll says it was one of the early engine makers to use roller bearings for the crankshaft, and that it and Volda were among the largest players in that engine market.

The sources used for this guide do not say how the company operated during the occupation of 1940–1945.

A fishermen’s idea in 1964.

The turn to thrusters came from a customer. In 1964, the company says, the local fishermen the Gjendemsjø brothers, long-time users of Brunvoll’s semi-diesel engines, wanted tunnel thrusters fitted to a new fishing vessel under construction at a local yard, and asked Brunvoll to design the units. Store norske leksikon tells the same story of a local fishing-boat owner and says Brunvoll has since built a solid market position for such thrusters.

The two sources differ on when engine-making ended. The encyclopedia says engine production stopped in 1960; the company says Brunvoll and Volda remained among the top diesel-engine brands in Norway until the mid-1960s, when both moved into new businesses — Brunvoll into tunnel thrusters and Volda into licence production of gearboxes.

Today Brunvoll describes its business as the design, manufacture, marketing and service of systems for the propulsion, positioning and manoeuvring of seagoing vessels. Its product pages list tunnel thrusters, including low-noise and rim-driven versions; retractable azimuth thrusters, among them a combi unit that works as a tunnel thruster when raised and as an azimuth thruster when lowered; azimuth propulsion units; and controllable-pitch and contra-rotating propellers, reduction gearboxes and automation systems.

The company says it is family-owned, and its slogan is “Trusted World Wide,” a vision it describes as the basis of its more than 100-year history. It says its customers include many of the designers, builders, operators and owners of advanced vessels. It says it is proud to produce in Norway under what it calls a “Production-in-Norway” strategy, with continued investment in robotised production. Store norske leksikon says the group had 640 employees in 2025, and illustrates its article with a period advertisement for a Brunvoll diesel engine from the company’s early decades.

Brunvoll says the green shift and digitalisation are the focus of its product development: energy-efficient propulsion for vessels with gears and propellers and for vessels with azimuth thrusters, systems for automated positioning and voyages, and its own Brunvoll Expert condition-monitoring system, with wider use of operational data.

Design and documentation.

Marine equipment makers sell to shipyards, shipowners and operators rather than to the public, and their identities reflect that. Their marks have long histories of their own: Schottel’s square S has been in use since the 1980s, its centenary history says, and Becker Marine Systems introduced its present logo with its new name in 2001, by the company’s account. The palettes in this guide are our own interpretation, in sea-going blues with warm accents, and none is taken from a company’s files.

The products themselves carry much of the visual weight. Thrusters, rudder propellers, rudders, deck machinery and bridge systems appear in this guide only as the companies publish and describe them, and their scale is part of the story: a regional magazine described one Schottel drive in Wismar in 2021 as twelve metres long once assembled.

Products are presented by vessel type as well as by name. Schottel says its RudderPropeller is used in more than 120 vessel types, from harbour tugs to ferries and offshore ships, and Becker presents rudders, nozzles and steering gear as parts of a single manoeuvring system for a given ship. Service matters as much as sale: both companies describe networks of subsidiaries and offices across Europe, Asia and the Americas, and German Wikipedia lists fourteen Schottel sales and service companies, from Brazil to South Korea.

Newer pages cover data. Schottel lists condition monitoring and data platforms among its products, and Becker sells monitoring systems for steering and rudder bearings. Trade fairs remain a fixed point in the calendar: Becker’s own history records a meeting at Nor-Shipping in Oslo that changed its management in 2001, and in 2022 Schottel’s holding company announced an agreement there, a trade paper reported.

Three workshops under one name.

The present group took shape in 2017. In March that year, Brunvoll says, it signed an agreement with Incus Investor ASA to buy all the shares in Scana Propulsion AS, including Scana Volda AS and Scana Mar-El AS in Norway and three sales companies in the United States, Singapore and China; Store norske leksikon records that Brunvoll bought all the shares in 2017. The purchase brought Volda, the workshop founded a year after Brunvoll, into the group. Volda, the company says, had developed a wide range of gearboxes and later added controllable-pitch propellers and control systems. Mar-El, founded in 1974 by two men with a keen interest in electronic systems, came with it; the company says Mar-El developed a wide range of controls for propulsion, manoeuvring and steering gear.

Store norske leksikon describes the group as three production companies: Brunvoll AS in Molde, with the head office, development department and thruster production; Brunvoll Volda AS in Volda, making gears and propellers; and Brunvoll Mar-El AS in Dalen in Telemark, which develops and makes manoeuvring and control systems. It also lists sales and development offices in Ålesund and Grenland, and a worldwide network of agents for sales and service. All three companies now work under the Brunvoll brand, the company says, and some of its historical material is kept at Bud Kystmuseum, a coastal museum at Bud outside Molde.

For a design guide, Brunvoll shows how a family name from an engine workshop can carry more than a century of change in what a company makes. Compare Schottel, another propulsion maker in this series, and Ulstein, a Norwegian family shipbuilding name. For this guide we use a deep sea blue, fjord grey and a buoy yellow with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Brunvoll’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.