The Lightning Forum award for spray painting!!

[ZeusDriver]

I won!!

Ok, maybe not. They have not established such an award yet.

But consider this: My Lightning powered my spray painting compressor. It was 49 degrees today. Uncomfortable and lower than ideal for spray painting. But I persevered, and got the carbon fiber beams on my boat's wing painted so that the epoxy would not deteriorate from sunlight. The Lightning is not covered in overspray. My wife's car is not covered in overspray! I went over all the paint with a hot air gun for about an hour to ensure that the dew does not wash off the paint (which is water-borne). I should win something!

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[Mach Turtle]

Carbon beams? A wing?? Sounds as if the Lightning isn't the only fast thing in the driveway...?

 

[Lytning]

Show me the boat!

 

[ZeusDriver]

Carbon beams? A wing?? Sounds as if the Lightning isn't the only fast thing in the driveway...?

I wish. Actually the boat is pretty slow, partly because of a catastrophe that led to shortening the wing by 8 feet. But even before that, the wing existed to make the boat easy and convenient to sail, more so than to make it go fast. Years ago, I designed and built a sailboat, also wing-powered, that would sail at pretty close to 3 times wind speed, but it was tricky to sail. The current project has much different goals... nearly the opposite in every respect. The use of carbon fiber has to do with the need for the wing to be dynamically balanced around its stub mast, so the forward part of the wing can be standard construction, but the part behind the stub mast needs to be very very light. Even so, I still had to add a balance weight out in front of the wing.

Although I bought the Lightning partly for towing this peculiar boat, I had not expected to use the truck as the power supply for running my compressor, or to run my welder. Works great for that stuff, even with the standard ProPower. So the post is partly about ProPower.

The other thing motivating the post is to share my experience with my Paasche airbrush. I am a mediocre painter, and have sprayed several cars motorcycles and boats through the years, and the results are almost always barely OK. But this little Paasche makes it easy to get a good finish without runs. I still have some Snapon wrenches that I bought more than 50 years ago, and have some other quite good tools, and I find it satisfying to use tools that really work well. This little Paasche is one of those, and I don't know exactly why, other than to say that the nozzles must be both very well designed and very well machined.

The Lightning is somewhat the same.... it just really works well.

 

[ZeusDriver]

Show me the boat!

Voila.

It looks a little less clunky in the water, but not a lot. It is kind of an SUV, and a proof-of-concept prototype.

When this pic was taken, the wing had been up for about a month, through several storms, and it behaved well. It weathervanes, so in this pic the wind is coming from behind the house (and from behind the boat). The small wing in "front" of the main wing is actually two wings -- they happen to line up perfectly in this view. The small beams supporting them are what broke, as a result of stunning stupidity on my part. In a gust, the wing flipped off its trailer just before plugging it into the boat... about 20 seconds before. I'd released a tiedown that prevents such shenanigans prematurely -- it should be released after the wing is plugged in, not before. I had not finished the pre-launch checklist... but what could go wrong??? (I had also, casually positioned the boat and wing with the wind from the wrong side. Wind from the leading edge of the wing just blows past (when the wing is on its trailer) and the trim wings keep things pretty stable. Reverse the direction, and the trim wings cause a divergent behavior.)

Those trim wings are extremely light, made from carbon fiber cloth in a single layer in most places, and no core. Amazingly, the crash did not destroy them.

The leading edge (toward the house in this shot) of the wing has a slat, which increases the maximum usable angle of attack. The trailing edge has a flap, which increases the coefficient of lift. A lever in the cockpit moves these together, the effect being to adjust the overall "power" of the wing. A second lever moves the trim wings, setting the angle of attack (and therefore the wing's overall force).

 

[Lytning]

Very interesting! Same concept as an aircraft wing, but generating "forward lift".
I like the bridge cabin style. Were you in the U.S. Navy?

 

[ZeusDriver]

The earlier boat I mentioned above :

It was at the opposite end of the spectrum from the current boat: Tricky to sail and very fast. It was fast enough that, if sailed well, you never gybed. The apparent wind was always forward (usually well forward c 20 degrees off the bow) of abeam. The boat was sailed flat all the time, balanced on the center, planing hull, with the outrigger hulls about 2' above the water. The black things near the outrigger hulls were toe straps that the pilot would hook into. It was 20 feet wide, so tacking involved crossing 20 feet while keeping the boat balanced. Oddly, that was a little easier than I'd anticipated... but I was physically fit back then.... and more mentally fit too.

 

[ZeusDriver]

Very interesting! Same concept as an aircraft wing, but generating "forward lift".
I like the bridge cabin style.

Were you in the U.S. Navy?

No, but I have a lot of admiration for those who were. I took my pre-induction physical (after college), but my draft number was one short of going in. I've flown a bit, and developed ground school courses for airline pilots, and have some aerobatic flight time. But for the life of me, I cannot imagine landing a plane on an aircraft carrier. If I walk away, I figure the landing was close enough.

I just had a thought:: if I can park my Lightning with one turn, I feel like a hero. Now, if I could land a plane in the same ocean as the carrier, I'd call it a win.

Yes, that is exactly it! And the perfect pic for showing flaps and slats. The trim wings on the boat are analogous to the elevator on an airplane. At some point when sailing the fast boat, (which was trimmed directly by yanking on the back of the wing) I pulled up on land to take a rest. Someone motored up, thinking they were seeing a crashed airplane.

Were you in the U.S. Navy?

No, and great admiration for those who were. I have flown aerobatics, etc, etc, but would consider being able to land a plane within a mile of an aircraft carrier a win.

 

[ZeusDriver]

Talk about mental health!! I don't know what happened there. I thought one post disappeared.

 

[pullinggs]

Voila.

Love the boat, but I bet that's hell going under a bridge on the highway.

 

[Mach Turtle]

Thanks for the boat photos! They each look like a blast (in different ways). The older one looks like the child of a scandalous affair involving an International Canoe, a windsurfer, and a Cessna 182. I'd love to sail something like that, except I've also had to move to a more age appropriate vessel.

As another amateur painter, I wonder if you could share the model number of the airbrush that has worked well for you? The best sprayer I have so far came with a voltage regulator, perhaps an indicator of some aspect of its quality. Below is a photo of the regulator and its box, actual image, no AI...

 

[ZeusDriver]

Thanks for the boat photos! They each look like a blast (in different ways). The older one looks like the child of a scandalous affair involving an International Canoe, a windsurfer, and a Cessna 182. I'd love to sail something like that, except I've also had to move to a more age appropriate vessel.

HAHA! Perfect description!! Spot on.

On the older boat, the mainsheet could be rigged (to the back of the flap, which was bungee centered) either 2:1 or 1:1. I always used 1:1 even when it was doing 32 knots in 10-15 knots true. It was a little twitchy, as was rudder control. Rudder, in particular, was just barely adequate at low speed, and then (given the square of speed thing) super duper effective at high speed, so a sneeze would case an immediate tack. (OK, I might be exaggerating... but not by much.)

Perhaps foolishly, I am going to build another small, strange-looking boat, but with an aerodynamically trimmed wing (instead of directly controlled) which should make it a little easier to sail, That and less sail area. The big boat has some features for capsize recovery, which I had once intended to demonstrate on that boat, but have since decided that I do not want to intentionally capsize it -- i've already had too much trauma. Capsize tests are better to do with a more manageable size... thus one motive for building the smaller boat.

 

[ZeusDriver]

As another amateur painter, I wonder if you could share the model number of the airbrush that has worked well for you? The best sprayer I have so far came with a voltage regulator, perhaps an indicator of some aspect of its quality. Below is a photo of the regulator and its box, actual image, no AI...

Wow! That is hilarious! Priceless.
My gun is this one:
https://www.engineersupply.com/Paas...VmyY2qKA6Gx6uh_VauYXkeFdLFA7fbJBoCjMkQAvD_BwE

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