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The Lightning is an American sailing dinghy that was designed by Olin Stephens of Sparkman & Stephens, as a one-design racer and first built in 1938. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] [ 3 ] An accepted World Sailing class, the boat is one of the most popular one-design sailing classes in the United States and is also raced in several other countries.
The philosophy is to have a dynamic system of handicapping which looks to the performance of a boat model over time but allows for adjustment to an individual boat based on options and/or modifications. What we consider long lean classic proportions of the boats of the early 1900s were at the time design exercises to manipulate the racing rules.
Uffa Fox started building 14s in 1923, and was designing them by 1925. He was to transform the class with the introduction of his first planing hull design, Avenger, in 1927. The construction and finish of his 14s was considered by many to be the ultimate in quality and craftsmanship, and Thunder and Lightning built in 1938 was no exception.
The boat is fitted with a Swedish Volvo D4-175 diesel engine of 175 hp (130 kW) for docking and maneuvering. The fuel tank holds 218 U.S. gallons (830 L; 182 imp gal) and the fresh water tank has a capacity of 264 U.S. gallons (1,000 L; 220 imp gal). [1] The design has been built with a number of semi-custom interior arrangements.
As head of design his first couple of hull designs were essentially re-works of existing hulls with minor changes. His first design undertaken from a ‘clean sheet’ was the C&C 33 done in the spring of 1974, a high performance design, fitting the three-quarter ton size. This design would race well and re-establish C&C's image on the race ...
Most designs are credited to Robert H. Perry, Harwood Ives, Scott Sprague and Tommy Chen. Boat production began in the early 1970s. In the mid 1980s Hans Christian Yachts commissioned the designing of a new series of boats based on a more modern hull design with the goal of the "ultimate cruising sailboat." The
Lightning was a clipper ship, one of the last really large clippers to be built in the United States. She was built by Donald McKay for James Baines of the Black Ball Line , Liverpool , for the Australia trade.
The design was originally sold in the form of plans for amateur construction, with more than 200 sets of plans sold. Bingham, the designer, commenced the construction of a plug for a hull of his own, but was compelled to sell it before it was completed to Nor'Star Fiberglass Yachts in California United States, who put the boat into production.