Re: 1965 Lightning sailboat
You've done a great job restoring the old girl. Lesser men would have thrown in the towel long ago (and have). Unfortunately, this has happened so often that I can no longer find any of them around. This might be a bit of a random question, but do you still have the boat, and even stranger, would you ever consider selling it? To give you some history, I live in Perth, Western Australia but up until about ten years ago I grew up in the US, and my grandfather was a boat builder named Martin Weir. I was looking online for an old lightning to fix up and teach my son to sail when I came across your postings. Obviously it would be unbelievable if that boat he learned on was built by his great grandfather! If you could please contact me it would be greatly appreciated. I hope you are still enjoying her after all these years.
Gentlemen,
I am the historian of the Lightning Class. This is the 75th anniversary of the design of the boat. We are trying to contact the families of the original builders to get the stories of these builders. Martin Weir is of particular interest as his boat was the first successful glass Lightning. If would please contact us with a PM to me or contact Laura Jeffers at the Lightning Class office
ffice@lightningclass.org Also join us at Wooden Lightning Yahoo Group where all classic Lightnings (#12290 and older) wood or glass will find a home.
Anyone else with Lightning History please respond.
FYI : Below is part of a letter I wrote to the Maritime Museum in Kingston ON. in response to an inquiry about glassboats. They are planing a Lightning history exhibit next year. Also I have posted the Nelson brochure in the photo section, I have several albums there of the development of the boat.
Letter:
I have been working on that story for awhile. The Lightning class builders led the way to modern composite construction. The flat panels of the Lightning,Snipe and Star made for an inexpensive build in wood but was just the opposite in glass. You remember the heartaches of the foam filled boats ( I bought a new Muller in '75 and had to replace the hull with a new Lippincott a year later). As you probably know fiberglass sailboat building began in the 1940s in Ohio where Owens Corning had a glass mill. They supplied Ray Green with half of the polyester resin they had received and he started with the Rebel which Nickels still builds today. The Snipe class was first to approach him about glass boats. He built some uncored Snipes but refused to continue when the class would not limit the number of glass boat builders. The Lightning was first built in glass by Bud Nelson in Toledo and was cored with balsa. Balsa then was provided in 4' long planks. Nickels & Holman assisted with the wooden parts. Dave Nickels told us last year that he remembers building centerboard trunks for them and that the interior was finished clear to look like the woodie. I am in contact with Kent Walker the stepson of Nelson's partner Bill Girkins. He sent me a brochure for the first glass Lightning ( see attached) and sure enough the wooden trunk was offered as an option. N&H offered a glass boat in the early sixties and these must have been from Nelson. Later Nelson went to work for Lippincott and in '65 N&H had an ad in Flashes for a Lightning with a 'Lippincott' hull. Later N&H built their own tooling. Also from Ohio was Bob Clark who moved to Washington state to build Lightnings.
The real first success in glass came from San Diego. Martin Weir developed a core material of glass roving wound around a foam block. To promote the material, 'Rovon', he had Carl Eichenlaub build tooling from which boats were laid up by Lewis Marine and trimmed by Carl. Check our Wooden Lightning Yahoo Photo section for my 'Rovon Revolution' :
Yahoo Groups groups/Wooden_Lightning/ photos/albums/1111206153 for this and other info. Principally a piece from a '64 Popular Mechanics on Rovon. Soon we see several ads in Flashes offering Rovon hulls trimmed by various shops. Note in the photos of #9470 the seat tooling that we remember from the Muller boat. Pappa John must have bought this tooling later for the ' Eichenlaub' boat. Carl was not going to glass. We have a Sports Illustrated piece on Carl that tells of him refusing glass. Carl took one of the boats to the Southern Circuit and won the first major race in a glassboat. In that same circuit Harry Sindle actually scored higher over all with his glass boat cored with a thin slurry of syntactic foam( glass beads stirred into resin) and more importantly internal structure in seat tanks. The combination of sheet foam core and internal structure would would eventually make for the boat we have today. Lippincott pioneered this with the seat/side tank boats. Bob Clark's boats were also built with seat tank and foam core. By 1968 we were blessed with many builders in all regions of the country building a fleet of glass boats to replace the woodies. In the seventies with pressures of petroleum costs and a high inflation rate our builders faced many difficulties. With so many builders the market was fractured. Ray Green's prescience proved correct. Fiberglass construction allowed for round hulled boats to be more cheaply built due the inherent rigidity of a curved surface eliminating full coring. The Flying Scot is the best example of this. The boat could be built with just two molds in much shorter time. The heavier weight of the Scot allowed for the cheaper balsa to be used in the flat sections. This coupled with short cuts like no non skid ( a difficult feature to maintain in molds) minimal hardware and rig and not required to have floatation tanks gave the builder a greater margin for a 'comparable' boat. Allen and Muller went to the foamed in boat and everybody else gave up. After this disaster Allen and Dave Nickles combined sheet foam and integral tank structure to give us our boat we sail today. These boats proved so durable frequent replacement became unnecessary and the builders were forced to compete with their own used boats.
This is my beta on the glassboats. Open to comment and correction.
Clayton "Corky" Gray
Website: corkyscanoes.com
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