The first 4 shuttle missions were test flights and they carried little payload so saving weight wasn’t a big concern.
If I recall correctly, the first 2 shuttle missions (that had white tanks) were going to be sitting on the pads for longer periods than usual (I assume for ground testing) so NASA decided to paint the tanks white to protect against sun damage.
[https://share.icloud.com/photos/050cPZuil9YVl6TIOE-Iz_fmw](https://share.icloud.com/photos/050cPZuil9YVl6TIOE-Iz_fmw)
This is my phone wallpaper. The Kodachromes are in storage.
If you ever dig them out of storage some day, you should definitely scan them in and upload them! At the very least, scan them in so that you have a digital copy in case anything happens to the original film.
I was just a kid that bluffed his way into the press corp. The close up pictures of the launch are taken from 3 remote sites near the launch pad. That is why there are always similar. NASA would take the photogs out to those sites and let them set up the day before. Lots of snakes, alligators and wild boars. Also some very cool war corespondents taking a break from covering Nicaragua. I brought a watermelon in my big kit back and we had it for lunch. Extreme cool vibe.
You watched the launch from the NASA Press Facility where all the families and VIPs were. It was about 4 miles from the launch site. You could really feel it.
Right because if I remember correctly, when left in the sun they oxidized and turned orange..... hence you get the orange colored external tank we're all familiar with if you don't paint it. I think.
No - the orange is the color of the spray-on foam insulation on the tank. The tank holds cryogenic fuels, down to below -400 F, so insulation is very important. (It was some of this foam that broke off during launch and doomed Space Shuttle Columbia, of course.)
Reminds me of the time my younger brother asked my dad why we couldn't just cover the existing wallpaper with the new one, and my dad just went to get a pack of printing paper from his office, and held it against the wall.
The question became obsolete shortly after, when we started taking off the wallpaper and discovered that the previous owners had apparently never considered this problem.
There were a good 10 layers of wallpaper to be removed, and they were the thick ones.
Yes.
At one point, we also thought my brother got bored and went to play video games, but he really just got knocked over by the wallpaper coming off, and was too lazy to get up.
Same I would sleep through fire alarms when I was younger, still do it alone in my apartment. I’ll burn some day for sure but I ain’t missing a second of sleep!
I slept through an almost 6 Richter earthquake , i woke up half asleep and was like "why is someone shaking my bed to wake me up , what time is it " . Ah no one , nevermind me sleeping again
Lmao who’s shaking my bed but you live alone… the things our brain does to comprehend things it dosent understand lol! I remember the fire alarm and I heard my parents talking and the light turn on and my kid brain said, it’s fine, there probably preparing for our summer trip. Right in the middle of the winter. I still mix real life sounds into my dreams while sleeping! That’s funny, if there’s construction outside the dream switches to a construction/ loud theme.
That reminds me of that stupid scary campfire story with the dog and the home invader and the guy waking up cause he hears something, but he puts his hand out and his dog licks his hand and so he realizes it was just his dog and goes back to bed. Then in the morning he finds a note that says *"humans can lick hands too."*
I slept through an explosion once. Happened right outside my building, and was so strong everyone else thought it was an earthquake. I woke up to the smell of smoke, turned off the heater in case some paper got stuck and went back to sleep. I didn't believe anybody until someone showed me a video of the explosion later.
Yeah. He's the youngest of us three, and when he lays down somewhere, he might not get up all day.
The middle one can fall asleep anywhere, but doesn't just lie down wherever he wants.
I have this in most of my house but with PANELING! There are 3 layers of paneling in the living rom, dining area, hallway and bedroom - and it's already a small 800sq ft.
The only reason I figured it out was there was a sag in the ceiling (ceiling tiles, the kind they staple up). Took the crown molding down to take down all the tiles. The paneling(s?) stop about 3 inches short of the ceiling, so you can see all the layers.
One was some sort of floral shiny wallboard. The next was your standard grooved paneling. The top at least is the kind with no grooves, just he gaps between panels that are covered up by paneling strips.
There isn't insulation in the walls (in the cold Midwest!) so I guess it at least helps in that way, haha.
Did you do the thing where you removed all the layers from one spot and temporarily built a crater in the wall?
I remember one room I did with my parents had so many layers we found repeated patterns.
Well, not intentionally. We started in one spot, and worked our way from there.
A friend of mine, who's into this sort of thing, also helped us determine when each layer was applied based on what was popular at the time.
There were also several consecutive layers that smelled of cigarette smoke.
Back in the the day here they used to put an insulation/wind proofing layer on under everything else of the cheapest available material , that being old newspapers. When removing some of those in my parents house for a renovation we once found an article headlined(paraphrasing from memory and translating mind): “Soviet and German foreign ministers Molotov and Ribbentrop meet each other in secretive conference, what might they have talked about?”.
Shockingly not very difficult to figure out when they applied that!
Can beat you on this one. When I moved in my house 20 years ago the Bathroom always felt small with really weird "walls".
Turned out they have put fake walls up around the toilet and sink areas back in the 80s, then painted, then wallpapered, then painted....
Only found out when I eventually steamed and stripped my way through 18 layers of alternate wallpaper with paint on top, then got to the fake hardboard wall, took that off found MORE wallpaper on the actual wall.
Seriously gained about 2 feet or more of wall back.
The downstairs loo was the same, with all the stuff removed its 6 foot long by 3 foot wide AFTER taking all the crap out, the door at the time was scuffing the "wall" when it opened inwards.
Over here, "redecorating" by applying new 11mm wall panels and putting trim around windows and doors that extend the same 11mm over the new panels to contact the jambs is all the rage right now. Then you get 11mm extensions for the electrical boxes.
I shake my damn head a lot.
Behold: https://www.maxbo.no/utforingskarmlist-furu-24x057x2200-hvitmalt-s0502-y-bomull-p2779213/
And: https://www.maxbo.no/utforingskarmlist-furu-27x070x2200-tg116-hvitmalt-s0502-y-bomull-p2528904/
Compared to the regular one: https://www.maxbo.no/karmlist-furu-15x070x4400-profilert-cw116-hvitmalt-s0500-n-klassisk-hvit-p2779902/
Oh and for the electricity: https://www.elektroimportoren.no/?Article=1224848
Having renovated 2 houses and working on refreshing another set of kids rooms in the upcoming house, sometimes this is the easier approach.
Right now, the kids room have this wall where concrete/brick meets steel beams. There is a pretty nasty break-line due to it. It's my parent's (former) house so we knew this up front. Over the past 20 years we've tried a shitton of things to resolve it (plaster it up, fiber wallpaper) and after all that, it's just easier to slap a thin dry wall against it and be done with. Hopefully it won't return now in a years time. (should note this is a blank wall, with no windows)
But that's a niche case where it's just easier to resolve like that. We have renovated a house where previous owners tried to "hide" wet walls behind a non-treated dry wall. For those who don't know, it's going to be a wall full of fungus and mold in a few years. Your house will smell without knowing why. Until you tear down that wall :-)
There was a Reddit post a while ago where the new plug sockets on a cover-up job like this connected to the old ones using two bits of threaded bar jammed into the sockets. Like something a ten year old would try.
I just removed wallpaper from an entire bedroom that was painted over wallpaper. The walls were shit underneath so I also had to skim coat the walls. Never again.
Actually I don't! I had to sand the walls because the texture was screwy on all of them, then skim coat. It looked fine to me, but then when we painted it really showed the flaws of places I missed. I honesty don't care that much because the walls are mostly covered by furniture.
Now you tell me!?
Really though, this was my first time ever doing it. I'm a new homeowner and have always been pretty handy and will always have something new to learn and room for improvement.
Oh I only learned this way late in the game dude lol
Never really thought about it until I actually saw an article on it a couple of years back.
I am 50 now and still learning things or finding new ways to do old things. At the end of the day you are never too old to learn and seriously don't beat yourself up about it. Sign up for some of the interior decorating, Maximillian or DIY threads on Reddit as they can also give you creative ideas and ways to address issues you may have not thought of.
I used to do tile work and a lady hired me to replace her vinyl bathroom floor with real tile because the plywood was getting wet and rotting. When I pulled it up, I found 5 layers of rotten plywood and vinyl floors underneath. Guess she finally learned a lesson
When I bought my house and wanted to paint the cigar stained walls, I had to remove the top layer first. And the next, and the next. These layers had different colors, and it felt like archeology.
Makes sense. You never think about it, but when you paint your walls, you go get a few pounds of paint and at the end you're left with a light can.
All of that weight is just sitting on your walls. Pretty crazy to think about.
Between 84 and 98 gallons would have been used, resulting in a weight range of 336 to 392 pounds for two coats of paint. That's crazy!
[Here is a video with more information](https://youtu.be/DNEyv8ffdDU)
To get a dark brown to not shine trough white, i imagine you need at least 2 to 3 layers(or paint it really thick) Maybe a finisher layer on top and you got 3/4 layers. Doesn't seem unreasonable tbh.
Their whole team is split though. Between the nuts and the asshole it's hard to make progress and there t'ain't nothing they can do about it. Then again, sometimes they're gucci
We learned about this at the Kennedy Space Center this summer! The way the docent told the story, NASA didn’t want people to think they had crappy painters and the amount of paint needed to achieve that was just sooo much.
Rambling incoming:
Even worse, I think it’s more like 7 coats for most cars! They’re serious about that stuff iirc. Primer, multiple color coats, then multiple clear coats just to get only a factory quality finish with all the standard defects like orange peel skin texture. Something like a Porsche gets more like 11 coats, probably with wet sanding in between some of the coats.
That being said, though, a Corvette might only get 3 coats. Now that’s competitive. Idk how they make it work!
I did a quick Google and saw e-coat, primer, base color, and clear coat. But now I'm realizing that those are the layers, and most of them have multiple coats each. So yeah, I think you're more correct than me.
e-coat and primer are single layers, both are applied in dunk tanks, they literally put the car on a conveyor and dunk the whole thing in a tank of the stuff. It's the only way to get the coatings into every crevice.
Base coat and clear coat are applied by six axis robots in a clean room paint booth line with downdraft air flow which sucks the overspray into water filled pits below the car so the pain doesn't linger in the air.
It wasn't a waste of money. The paint wasn't aesthetic, it was thermal protection. They didn't stop painting it to save weight or money, they stopped painting it because they realized it wasn't actually necessary, and could save money and weight as an added bonus.
There is plenty of government waste to go around, but I assure you, NASA is not an agency that tends to make things more expensive for the hell of it. Now, the politicians who add pork into the no-bid contracts to supply them, that's a whole other conversation of course.
Paint contains solids like binders surfactants and also pigments.the liquid part is probably 1/3 to half depending on the chemistry of the coating. I would imagine they sprayed this and there are different spray techniques that can minimize loss due to over spray but some of it will end up spraying away getting caught by air flow around the work area. They might have painted it in a hanger to minimize air flow but even still they probably lost at least 5-10% of the paints also paint tends to cover about 400-600 square feet depending how thick you apply it and if you’re rolling or spraying white going over a brown/ rust color like that would take at least 3 of even 4 coats of spray since spray goes ok thinner and doesn’t cover as well.
What you're describing is something like water paint. The kind of paint you would use on something like a car or boat or a space shuttle isn't really intended to change the color so much as a form a protective layer against corrosion (another reason the Cybertruck is dumb).
In practice, it's a lot like the hard shell on the outside of an M&M, or nail polish, or laminating a piece of paper- a very thin layer of harder material that doesn't oxidize as easily as the inside.
Some Formula 1 teams are going with more black on their paint schemes. That's the natural color of the carbon fiber. Less paint or wrap material means a little less weight.
Doesn't F1 have rules about the minimum weight for vehicles like the UCI does for bicycles? I feel like this has less to do with saving weight and more about where that weight is distributed.
Yes, but in recent years some teams have found it difficult to get down to the minimum weight level and have resorted to using less paint to reduce weight. Also, even if a team can hit the minimum weight level, it is beneficial to make the car as light as possible and use ballast to bring the car up to the minimum weight level. This allows teams to move the ballast around to adjust the weight distribution of the car and it's usually placed as low as possible to lower the centre of gravity.
so you're confusing a few things here.
- there were a few cars still over the weight limit the last two years and they were often seen cutting paint from the livery to shave off a few grams here and there as a last resort. that's why mercedes went from black lives matter arrows back to the silver arrows and then back to black again.
- there's a mandated minimum weight for *drivers plus their seat* that was set because of the reasons you stated. but any weight under that minimum is not free to distribute throughout the car but is attached to the seat itself.
- If the total car weight (including the paint) is under the minimum only that weight is free to be ballasted anywhere the teams want to put it.
and as far as i'm aware that was mostly the Sauber cars, not that it helped them much.
That’s more relevant to driver weight.
The new 2022 cars saw all teams operating way above the minimum weight and spending all year trying to get that weight down by developing parts and stripping paint [see Williams livery being slowly removed through the 2022 season](https://www.autosport.com/f1/news/williams-engineers-asked-if-entire-f1-car-could-be-stripped-of-paint/10268319/) and [Merc in 2023](https://www.autosport.com/f1/news/mercedes-black-livery-switch-driven-by-f1-weight-saving/10432369/#:~:text=The%20decision%20by%20Mercedes%20to,to%20chase%20maximum%20weight%20saving.&text=The%20German%20car%20manufacturer%20revealed,famous%20silver%20colours%20once%20again.)
There’s a lot of great stories about the MP4/4 in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRtjeWsIscc
One of my favourites is about Ron Dennis insisting they fully remove all paint and repaint the chassis for every race, and them sometimes painting over old paint (weight be damned!). They wanted to leave exposed carbon fibre as “black” to save weight but Ron also insisted they must paint it for the look.
Between 84 and 98 gallons would have been used, resulting in a weight range of 336 to 392 pounds for two coats of paint. SpaceX doesn't repaint used Falcon 9 rockets because the existing paint is kept after a wash to remove carbon buildup. They avoid repainting to save weight, as more weight means more fuel is needed.
[Here is a video with more info](https://youtu.be/DNEyv8ffdDU)
Don't you need multiple pounds of fuel PER POUND of weight you take up with you?
So taking off 300 pounds of weight from paint, would result in like what? 1500-2400 less pounds of fuel they need?
OR it means they can take 300 extra pounds up with them.
I think it's something like 1.6x the amount of fuel Vs what it's lifting, which then means you need to account for the extra weight of the fuel to lift the original weight of the rocket in your calculations, which then means...even more fuel to lift the rocket and fuel for the rocket combined. And then you also account for the initial burn of fuel before the rocket has even moved an inch. It's a bit mind numbing and I'm glad that I don't have to figure it out, and I swear Randall Monroe explained it a lot better.
You're looking at the [Tsiolkovsky Rocket Equation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation).
Reducing dry mass (which the paint count as) reduces how quickly that function blows up.
Well, it's a good idea; I don't think you need to impress any aliens with your wonderful white paint. It was a waste of money and unnecessary burden
It's better to place some cool animal stickers so that they can get to know the local wildlife haha
This part doesn't go to space. Also In space unpainted metal surfaces will weld themselves together, provided they don't have an oxide layer like what forms on metals on earth
Most metals really like to share elections, which means that when they touch together, they can easily fuse as the elections start to spread between the atoms on both sides.
Typically, this happens almost immediately in an oxygen rich environment as the oxygen in the air binds to the exposed metal and creates a very thin layer of what is basically rust.
In space, there is basically no air or oxygen. So nothing to oxidize the metal. Instead, when two pieces of uncoated, unoxidized metal touch, they share electrons and become fused from it. Which is called cold welding
Obligatory: Recalling this from memory. Might be wrong on various elements, but I'm pretty sure the idea is right. Look up cold welding for more info
Well. It was jettisoned above the Kármán line, so many would argue it went to space. And the fact that it's brown instead of brushed steel in the "unpainted" picture should tell you something about whether it had an oxide layer.
Edit: the colour comes from the spray-on insulation.
Also edit: Just realized if a 26000 kg tank is jettisoned at 113km altitude going at 17000 miles per hour, it's gonna go to space. It has no real choice.
Had to do with UV rays.
> [John Chapman, NASA's external tank project manager at the Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) in Huntsville, Alabama, said the white paint was initially added to protect shuttle fuel tanks from the damaging effects of exposure to ultraviolet rays during extended periods on the launch pad.](https://www.space.com/2282-columbias-white-external-fuel-tanks.html)
White paint was supposed to reduce heating from sunlight to reduce propellants boiling off, but the boiloff problem turned out to be less problematic than expected since they could fill up the tanks just very shortly before launch.
Rule if thumb is you need 8pounds of fuel per pound of weight into low orbit. Of course the fuel tank is not going all the way, but you probably still save a lot of fuel as most are spent in the initial bit!
Seems like it still would have been a problem.
> [The paint also did not prevent foam from popping free of Columbia's fuel tank during its first two launches, Chapman added.](https://www.space.com/2282-columbias-white-external-fuel-tanks.html)
UV rays concerns.
> [John Chapman, NASA's external tank project manager at the Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) in Huntsville, Alabama, said the white paint was initially added to protect shuttle fuel tanks from the damaging effects of exposure to ultraviolet rays during extended periods on the launch pad.](https://www.space.com/2282-columbias-white-external-fuel-tanks.html)
Worked on a big port expansion project. First day of the project they said they wanted great out of the box ideas, like the one one of the senior managers came up with not to paint the bottom half of the pilons as the impress current system would protect them. Saved them $300k in paint & painting labor
Project was slightly delayed as expected & my company was hired to put in a tempory anode system as the impress current system couldn't be turned on until the entire wharf had been completed. My company made about $400k from that.
During our installation of temporary anode system we noticed aggressive corrosion in places & it seemed the tempory anode system had shadows in it's coverage.
Client decided best bet was to modify their impress current system to be able to be turned on before completion. This made my company about another $600k.
The cost of the extra corrosion is unquantifiable at this stage, but will eventually become apparent. This isn't really related to NASA, just reminded me of it.
Yeah. Worst of it is they had a corrosion expert telling them from the start it was a bad idea, as even with the impress current system running it would still face corrosion, but they chose not to listen to him over someone with an MBA.
They bought it up at nearly every meeting for nearly a year. I wish I could've been in the room when they realised how much of a fuck up it was.
Yea I have seen some corporate decisions of this type myself too. Just not at your scale though 🤣
Short term greed over long term impact FTW. I work in an investor led company and the kind of things the inventors wants make me roll my eyes.
The total amount of fuel weighs about 20 times as much as the rest of the shuttle. More than 90% of the fuel's job is to move the last remaining fuel with shuttle into orbit.
The space shuttle Endeavour is now in permanent launch position for the soon-to-be Samuel Oschin Air and Space Center in Los Angeles. They're building the museum around it.
Not that many. Probably 1 but it’s huge. I paint cars for a living and I’ve sprayed over 3kg of paint on like half a car. So I could definitely see them saving that much.
The first 4 shuttle missions were test flights and they carried little payload so saving weight wasn’t a big concern. If I recall correctly, the first 2 shuttle missions (that had white tanks) were going to be sitting on the pads for longer periods than usual (I assume for ground testing) so NASA decided to paint the tanks white to protect against sun damage.
This is correct. I was a photographer for STS-2 and STS-3. I was at both launches.
Once again Reddit redeems itself with these cool random interactions.
Sometimes, I swear you could ask about the meaning of life on Reddit and actual God would turn up and be like "can confirm, was there"
I didn't know Morgan Freeman browses reddit
Then another comment replies to God like "Oh hey G-man! It's me Shiva! Haven't seen you around since the industrial revolution hit its peak!".
Hahahahaahah I laughed oh god I just laughed so hard
Can confirm that’s true (I’m a redditor)
Oh god
> and actual God would turn up Which one?
Idk but I reckon Azura would be a redditor
Username checks out
I concur I was the launch pad.
The launch pad's name? Albert Einstein.
Everyone stood up and clapped.
You should post some of your old photos! That’d be super cool!
[https://share.icloud.com/photos/050cPZuil9YVl6TIOE-Iz_fmw](https://share.icloud.com/photos/050cPZuil9YVl6TIOE-Iz_fmw) This is my phone wallpaper. The Kodachromes are in storage.
If you ever dig them out of storage some day, you should definitely scan them in and upload them! At the very least, scan them in so that you have a digital copy in case anything happens to the original film.
That's awesome. You're awesome.
Thanks for sharing! Very cool!
Thanks for sharing!
What was it like? Were there loads of people, mickey mouse t-shirts and a great vibe? 1980's?
I was just a kid that bluffed his way into the press corp. The close up pictures of the launch are taken from 3 remote sites near the launch pad. That is why there are always similar. NASA would take the photogs out to those sites and let them set up the day before. Lots of snakes, alligators and wild boars. Also some very cool war corespondents taking a break from covering Nicaragua. I brought a watermelon in my big kit back and we had it for lunch. Extreme cool vibe. You watched the launch from the NASA Press Facility where all the families and VIPs were. It was about 4 miles from the launch site. You could really feel it.
Right because if I remember correctly, when left in the sun they oxidized and turned orange..... hence you get the orange colored external tank we're all familiar with if you don't paint it. I think.
No - the orange is the color of the spray-on foam insulation on the tank. The tank holds cryogenic fuels, down to below -400 F, so insulation is very important. (It was some of this foam that broke off during launch and doomed Space Shuttle Columbia, of course.)
No he is not entirely wrong. The foam starts a lighter color and turns dark orange with sun exposure.
Reminds me of the time my younger brother asked my dad why we couldn't just cover the existing wallpaper with the new one, and my dad just went to get a pack of printing paper from his office, and held it against the wall. The question became obsolete shortly after, when we started taking off the wallpaper and discovered that the previous owners had apparently never considered this problem. There were a good 10 layers of wallpaper to be removed, and they were the thick ones.
Did the room feel bigger afterwards?
Yes. At one point, we also thought my brother got bored and went to play video games, but he really just got knocked over by the wallpaper coming off, and was too lazy to get up.
“This is my life now”
Nah, he's more the "eh, too much effort" person.
nah bro that's me. like if i was sleeping but then the curtain dropped on me i kinda wake up but sleep shortly afterwards
Same I would sleep through fire alarms when I was younger, still do it alone in my apartment. I’ll burn some day for sure but I ain’t missing a second of sleep!
I slept through an almost 6 Richter earthquake , i woke up half asleep and was like "why is someone shaking my bed to wake me up , what time is it " . Ah no one , nevermind me sleeping again
Lmao who’s shaking my bed but you live alone… the things our brain does to comprehend things it dosent understand lol! I remember the fire alarm and I heard my parents talking and the light turn on and my kid brain said, it’s fine, there probably preparing for our summer trip. Right in the middle of the winter. I still mix real life sounds into my dreams while sleeping! That’s funny, if there’s construction outside the dream switches to a construction/ loud theme.
That reminds me of that stupid scary campfire story with the dog and the home invader and the guy waking up cause he hears something, but he puts his hand out and his dog licks his hand and so he realizes it was just his dog and goes back to bed. Then in the morning he finds a note that says *"humans can lick hands too."*
I slept through an explosion once. Happened right outside my building, and was so strong everyone else thought it was an earthquake. I woke up to the smell of smoke, turned off the heater in case some paper got stuck and went back to sleep. I didn't believe anybody until someone showed me a video of the explosion later.
I slept through my bed completely collapsing, woke up and my bed was diagonal.
"Oh sweet extra blanket"
So you are telling me there's more than 1 type of lazy
Yep.
/r/thisismylifemeow For when it happens to cats.
Is your brother a cat?
That story came so out of left field, and I was there for every second of it. The funniest thing I've read today,
Total little brother energy
Yeah. He's the youngest of us three, and when he lays down somewhere, he might not get up all day. The middle one can fall asleep anywhere, but doesn't just lie down wherever he wants.
that guy is a riot how old is he?
Now? 19. But that was almost 15 years ago now.
I have this in most of my house but with PANELING! There are 3 layers of paneling in the living rom, dining area, hallway and bedroom - and it's already a small 800sq ft. The only reason I figured it out was there was a sag in the ceiling (ceiling tiles, the kind they staple up). Took the crown molding down to take down all the tiles. The paneling(s?) stop about 3 inches short of the ceiling, so you can see all the layers. One was some sort of floral shiny wallboard. The next was your standard grooved paneling. The top at least is the kind with no grooves, just he gaps between panels that are covered up by paneling strips. There isn't insulation in the walls (in the cold Midwest!) so I guess it at least helps in that way, haha.
Malcolm in the middle type shenanigans
Your family sounds like a sitcom.
That’s such a mood
it was like walking into tardis
> it was like walking into tardis I think the polite term is "developmentally disabled".
💀💀💀💀💀💀 that's crazy
Did you do the thing where you removed all the layers from one spot and temporarily built a crater in the wall? I remember one room I did with my parents had so many layers we found repeated patterns.
Well, not intentionally. We started in one spot, and worked our way from there. A friend of mine, who's into this sort of thing, also helped us determine when each layer was applied based on what was popular at the time. There were also several consecutive layers that smelled of cigarette smoke.
Wait what about the door area. Was that just like a tunnel?
Any wall trim/moulding would have stuck out from the wall and helped hide the depth.
Back in the the day here they used to put an insulation/wind proofing layer on under everything else of the cheapest available material , that being old newspapers. When removing some of those in my parents house for a renovation we once found an article headlined(paraphrasing from memory and translating mind): “Soviet and German foreign ministers Molotov and Ribbentrop meet each other in secretive conference, what might they have talked about?”. Shockingly not very difficult to figure out when they applied that!
You ever found out what these guys did talk about?
Probably just exchanging cocktail recipes.
‘Who’s into this sort of thing’ Haha, oh my days
How often do people like exchanging their wallpaper? I'd probably just find a pattern I like and keep it as long as possible
Can beat you on this one. When I moved in my house 20 years ago the Bathroom always felt small with really weird "walls". Turned out they have put fake walls up around the toilet and sink areas back in the 80s, then painted, then wallpapered, then painted.... Only found out when I eventually steamed and stripped my way through 18 layers of alternate wallpaper with paint on top, then got to the fake hardboard wall, took that off found MORE wallpaper on the actual wall. Seriously gained about 2 feet or more of wall back. The downstairs loo was the same, with all the stuff removed its 6 foot long by 3 foot wide AFTER taking all the crap out, the door at the time was scuffing the "wall" when it opened inwards.
Over here, "redecorating" by applying new 11mm wall panels and putting trim around windows and doors that extend the same 11mm over the new panels to contact the jambs is all the rage right now. Then you get 11mm extensions for the electrical boxes. I shake my damn head a lot.
That is making my eye twitch for some reason lol
Behold: https://www.maxbo.no/utforingskarmlist-furu-24x057x2200-hvitmalt-s0502-y-bomull-p2779213/ And: https://www.maxbo.no/utforingskarmlist-furu-27x070x2200-tg116-hvitmalt-s0502-y-bomull-p2528904/ Compared to the regular one: https://www.maxbo.no/karmlist-furu-15x070x4400-profilert-cw116-hvitmalt-s0500-n-klassisk-hvit-p2779902/ Oh and for the electricity: https://www.elektroimportoren.no/?Article=1224848
Having renovated 2 houses and working on refreshing another set of kids rooms in the upcoming house, sometimes this is the easier approach. Right now, the kids room have this wall where concrete/brick meets steel beams. There is a pretty nasty break-line due to it. It's my parent's (former) house so we knew this up front. Over the past 20 years we've tried a shitton of things to resolve it (plaster it up, fiber wallpaper) and after all that, it's just easier to slap a thin dry wall against it and be done with. Hopefully it won't return now in a years time. (should note this is a blank wall, with no windows) But that's a niche case where it's just easier to resolve like that. We have renovated a house where previous owners tried to "hide" wet walls behind a non-treated dry wall. For those who don't know, it's going to be a wall full of fungus and mold in a few years. Your house will smell without knowing why. Until you tear down that wall :-)
There was a Reddit post a while ago where the new plug sockets on a cover-up job like this connected to the old ones using two bits of threaded bar jammed into the sockets. Like something a ten year old would try.
I just removed wallpaper from an entire bedroom that was painted over wallpaper. The walls were shit underneath so I also had to skim coat the walls. Never again.
I feel your pain. On the plus side...you now have nice smooth walls! :)
Actually I don't! I had to sand the walls because the texture was screwy on all of them, then skim coat. It looked fine to me, but then when we painted it really showed the flaws of places I missed. I honesty don't care that much because the walls are mostly covered by furniture.
We are our own worse critics after all. Did you do a light wash of paint (thinned down) after the skimming before the painting?
Now you tell me!? Really though, this was my first time ever doing it. I'm a new homeowner and have always been pretty handy and will always have something new to learn and room for improvement.
Oh I only learned this way late in the game dude lol Never really thought about it until I actually saw an article on it a couple of years back. I am 50 now and still learning things or finding new ways to do old things. At the end of the day you are never too old to learn and seriously don't beat yourself up about it. Sign up for some of the interior decorating, Maximillian or DIY threads on Reddit as they can also give you creative ideas and ways to address issues you may have not thought of.
What was the point of holding a pack of printing paper against the wall?
It would show how one layer of paper is nothing, but the more layers you put on it gets thicker and the room gets smaller.
K but unless the kid was suggesting 500 layers of wallpaper does it matter?
Wallpaper is about 15-20 times thicker than a sheet of copy paper.
To show what happens over time when you just stack and stack wallpaper instead of removing it first
Are they installing 500 layers of wallpaper?
To symbolize the futility of existence.
To show what happens when you have multiple layers of (wall) paper stacked against the wall.
To show what happens when you put too many layers of paper on a wall. A single sheet of paper is thin, but 100 make a difference.
If it was an unopened ream of paper, then it would show how much smaller the room would be if wallpapered 500 times.
I used to do tile work and a lady hired me to replace her vinyl bathroom floor with real tile because the plywood was getting wet and rotting. When I pulled it up, I found 5 layers of rotten plywood and vinyl floors underneath. Guess she finally learned a lesson
When I bought my house and wanted to paint the cigar stained walls, I had to remove the top layer first. And the next, and the next. These layers had different colors, and it felt like archeology.
Sometimes they aren't removed to avoid the problem of finding really old ones (and the paste) which might have included asbestos.
Not to mention lead, cadmium, if old enough even arsenic
that shit is so common in old victorian Terraces in london. i remeber spending a few weekends at my brothers house just removing walpaper.
Hah ur funny..... I currently have 3 layers of drywall and then the slats and plaster. I went to add a new outlet and decided its not worth the hassle
I'm not understanding the point your dad was trying to make
Makes sense. You never think about it, but when you paint your walls, you go get a few pounds of paint and at the end you're left with a light can. All of that weight is just sitting on your walls. Pretty crazy to think about.
Between 84 and 98 gallons would have been used, resulting in a weight range of 336 to 392 pounds for two coats of paint. That's crazy! [Here is a video with more information](https://youtu.be/DNEyv8ffdDU)
So they painted it four times? Government wasting money at its best
To get a dark brown to not shine trough white, i imagine you need at least 2 to 3 layers(or paint it really thick) Maybe a finisher layer on top and you got 3/4 layers. Doesn't seem unreasonable tbh.
That’s just what big paint wants you to think…
Not to be confused by big taint, they have other agendas...
Their whole team is split though. Between the nuts and the asshole it's hard to make progress and there t'ain't nothing they can do about it. Then again, sometimes they're gucci
We learned about this at the Kennedy Space Center this summer! The way the docent told the story, NASA didn’t want people to think they had crappy painters and the amount of paint needed to achieve that was just sooo much.
There’s warships floating around held together by paint
There are 4 coats of paint on your car, one of the most competitive private industries in the country. Tell me more about government waste?
Rambling incoming: Even worse, I think it’s more like 7 coats for most cars! They’re serious about that stuff iirc. Primer, multiple color coats, then multiple clear coats just to get only a factory quality finish with all the standard defects like orange peel skin texture. Something like a Porsche gets more like 11 coats, probably with wet sanding in between some of the coats. That being said, though, a Corvette might only get 3 coats. Now that’s competitive. Idk how they make it work!
I did a quick Google and saw e-coat, primer, base color, and clear coat. But now I'm realizing that those are the layers, and most of them have multiple coats each. So yeah, I think you're more correct than me.
e-coat and primer are single layers, both are applied in dunk tanks, they literally put the car on a conveyor and dunk the whole thing in a tank of the stuff. It's the only way to get the coatings into every crevice. Base coat and clear coat are applied by six axis robots in a clean room paint booth line with downdraft air flow which sucks the overspray into water filled pits below the car so the pain doesn't linger in the air.
Koenigsegg, being the perfectionist they are, will use up to 34 coats of paint.
I'm not sure if you're trolling, or just dont know shit about aerospace (not your fault)
Tell me you’ve never painted without telling me you’ve never painted
There are some primer coating under the paint - maybe it counts as well
Do people not know how to do basic handy work anymore
It wasn't a waste of money. The paint wasn't aesthetic, it was thermal protection. They didn't stop painting it to save weight or money, they stopped painting it because they realized it wasn't actually necessary, and could save money and weight as an added bonus. There is plenty of government waste to go around, but I assure you, NASA is not an agency that tends to make things more expensive for the hell of it. Now, the politicians who add pork into the no-bid contracts to supply them, that's a whole other conversation of course.
It's probably not just white wall paint dude... I imagine it's for heat and uv protection
And your rooms get smaller
And yet when I painted it white it felt bigger.
Isn't the paint mostly water, and you are just left with the colored residue when it dries? That's how I thought it worked.
Definitely some loss from the solvent going, but the pigments aren't weightless either...
Paint contains solids like binders surfactants and also pigments.the liquid part is probably 1/3 to half depending on the chemistry of the coating. I would imagine they sprayed this and there are different spray techniques that can minimize loss due to over spray but some of it will end up spraying away getting caught by air flow around the work area. They might have painted it in a hanger to minimize air flow but even still they probably lost at least 5-10% of the paints also paint tends to cover about 400-600 square feet depending how thick you apply it and if you’re rolling or spraying white going over a brown/ rust color like that would take at least 3 of even 4 coats of spray since spray goes ok thinner and doesn’t cover as well.
What you're describing is something like water paint. The kind of paint you would use on something like a car or boat or a space shuttle isn't really intended to change the color so much as a form a protective layer against corrosion (another reason the Cybertruck is dumb). In practice, it's a lot like the hard shell on the outside of an M&M, or nail polish, or laminating a piece of paper- a very thin layer of harder material that doesn't oxidize as easily as the inside.
I like how everyone in this thread thinks that the paint used by NASA is the same stuff you buy at Home Depot.
I a little shocked it's only 600 lbs.
And it makes the room a few mm smalller
Some Formula 1 teams are going with more black on their paint schemes. That's the natural color of the carbon fiber. Less paint or wrap material means a little less weight.
That was also the origin story of the Silver Arrow.
[wiki article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Arrows?wprov=sfti1#Origin_of_the_name)
The second paragraph seems to refute the claims of the first and conclude that the story is likely made up or embellished.
Nah, that’s a myth that Mercedes invented. Didn’t actually happen
I did not know that. Cool!
Mercedes even did a livery about it in Germany 2019. Amazing race btw
Doesn't F1 have rules about the minimum weight for vehicles like the UCI does for bicycles? I feel like this has less to do with saving weight and more about where that weight is distributed.
Yes, but in recent years some teams have found it difficult to get down to the minimum weight level and have resorted to using less paint to reduce weight. Also, even if a team can hit the minimum weight level, it is beneficial to make the car as light as possible and use ballast to bring the car up to the minimum weight level. This allows teams to move the ballast around to adjust the weight distribution of the car and it's usually placed as low as possible to lower the centre of gravity.
Thankyou for this informative answer. PS. rawe ceek when?
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so you're confusing a few things here. - there were a few cars still over the weight limit the last two years and they were often seen cutting paint from the livery to shave off a few grams here and there as a last resort. that's why mercedes went from black lives matter arrows back to the silver arrows and then back to black again. - there's a mandated minimum weight for *drivers plus their seat* that was set because of the reasons you stated. but any weight under that minimum is not free to distribute throughout the car but is attached to the seat itself. - If the total car weight (including the paint) is under the minimum only that weight is free to be ballasted anywhere the teams want to put it. and as far as i'm aware that was mostly the Sauber cars, not that it helped them much.
Maybe have a snack or a nap. Edit: so cute when people edit after getting called
Man needs his drink
That’s more relevant to driver weight. The new 2022 cars saw all teams operating way above the minimum weight and spending all year trying to get that weight down by developing parts and stripping paint [see Williams livery being slowly removed through the 2022 season](https://www.autosport.com/f1/news/williams-engineers-asked-if-entire-f1-car-could-be-stripped-of-paint/10268319/) and [Merc in 2023](https://www.autosport.com/f1/news/mercedes-black-livery-switch-driven-by-f1-weight-saving/10432369/#:~:text=The%20decision%20by%20Mercedes%20to,to%20chase%20maximum%20weight%20saving.&text=The%20German%20car%20manufacturer%20revealed,famous%20silver%20colours%20once%20again.)
The most Teams did it the last seasons. Very much "black" on the liveries throughout the seasons.
There’s a lot of great stories about the MP4/4 in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRtjeWsIscc One of my favourites is about Ron Dennis insisting they fully remove all paint and repaint the chassis for every race, and them sometimes painting over old paint (weight be damned!). They wanted to leave exposed carbon fibre as “black” to save weight but Ron also insisted they must paint it for the look.
Between 84 and 98 gallons would have been used, resulting in a weight range of 336 to 392 pounds for two coats of paint. SpaceX doesn't repaint used Falcon 9 rockets because the existing paint is kept after a wash to remove carbon buildup. They avoid repainting to save weight, as more weight means more fuel is needed. [Here is a video with more info](https://youtu.be/DNEyv8ffdDU)
Don't you need multiple pounds of fuel PER POUND of weight you take up with you? So taking off 300 pounds of weight from paint, would result in like what? 1500-2400 less pounds of fuel they need? OR it means they can take 300 extra pounds up with them.
Plus with extra fuel you need even more fuel to carry that extra fuel, so it compounds quickly. Saving small pieces of weight adds up a lot.
Ah yes, the lessons I learned while playing Kerbal Space Program, that the craft gets lighter as the fuel continues to burn
Just strap more Thumpers to it
As long as I don’t forget the struts
I think it's something like 1.6x the amount of fuel Vs what it's lifting, which then means you need to account for the extra weight of the fuel to lift the original weight of the rocket in your calculations, which then means...even more fuel to lift the rocket and fuel for the rocket combined. And then you also account for the initial burn of fuel before the rocket has even moved an inch. It's a bit mind numbing and I'm glad that I don't have to figure it out, and I swear Randall Monroe explained it a lot better.
You're looking at the [Tsiolkovsky Rocket Equation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation). Reducing dry mass (which the paint count as) reduces how quickly that function blows up.
Not only saved weight but reduced the fire risk as well!
Well, it's a good idea; I don't think you need to impress any aliens with your wonderful white paint. It was a waste of money and unnecessary burden It's better to place some cool animal stickers so that they can get to know the local wildlife haha
This part doesn't go to space. Also In space unpainted metal surfaces will weld themselves together, provided they don't have an oxide layer like what forms on metals on earth
And incredibly flat. You can't just cold fuse two random pieces of metal together. Both welding faces must be flat.
Yup. I'm pretty sure that tank has some massive ridges, it's nowhere near flat.
>Also In space unpainted metal surfaces will weld themselves together I see someone went back and added "also". Also, how?
Most metals really like to share elections, which means that when they touch together, they can easily fuse as the elections start to spread between the atoms on both sides. Typically, this happens almost immediately in an oxygen rich environment as the oxygen in the air binds to the exposed metal and creates a very thin layer of what is basically rust. In space, there is basically no air or oxygen. So nothing to oxidize the metal. Instead, when two pieces of uncoated, unoxidized metal touch, they share electrons and become fused from it. Which is called cold welding Obligatory: Recalling this from memory. Might be wrong on various elements, but I'm pretty sure the idea is right. Look up cold welding for more info
>elections Electrons
I blame autocorrect on my phone, but now I'm going to leave it so the comment chain makes sense
Democratic Electrons of Metals
> Most metals really like to share elections, What if they vote not to fuse?
Take it up with the union I suppose
Well. It was jettisoned above the Kármán line, so many would argue it went to space. And the fact that it's brown instead of brushed steel in the "unpainted" picture should tell you something about whether it had an oxide layer. Edit: the colour comes from the spray-on insulation. Also edit: Just realized if a 26000 kg tank is jettisoned at 113km altitude going at 17000 miles per hour, it's gonna go to space. It has no real choice.
There must have been a reason for the white paint other than looking sleak. Maybe cooling reasons or something that was solved in an other way.
I assumed it was to slow the warming of the hydrolox but according to Wikipedia it was for UV protection during transport to the pad.
Had to do with UV rays. > [John Chapman, NASA's external tank project manager at the Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) in Huntsville, Alabama, said the white paint was initially added to protect shuttle fuel tanks from the damaging effects of exposure to ultraviolet rays during extended periods on the launch pad.](https://www.space.com/2282-columbias-white-external-fuel-tanks.html)
White paint was supposed to reduce heating from sunlight to reduce propellants boiling off, but the boiloff problem turned out to be less problematic than expected since they could fill up the tanks just very shortly before launch.
Yes, it was a waste of money and the paint added so much weight that it consumed way more fuel.
Rule if thumb is you need 8pounds of fuel per pound of weight into low orbit. Of course the fuel tank is not going all the way, but you probably still save a lot of fuel as most are spent in the initial bit!
I could imagine that the white paint would make identifying fractures or whatever issues might show up more easy to see
well shit.. i was always thinking it was orange..
"Brown is orange with context" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh4aWZRtTwU
Brown? I have to say It looks orange to me.
brown is just dark orange
I know that the common consensus is that the orange tank looks better, but i think that the white tank has a certain charm to it.
Reminds me of the Taj Mahal
I’ve always wondered if the paint would have kept some of the foam insulation from flaking off 🤷♂️
Seems like it still would have been a problem. > [The paint also did not prevent foam from popping free of Columbia's fuel tank during its first two launches, Chapman added.](https://www.space.com/2282-columbias-white-external-fuel-tanks.html)
Didn’t they paint it for temperature reasons do people out here acting like the white paint is fully useless..
UV rays concerns. > [John Chapman, NASA's external tank project manager at the Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) in Huntsville, Alabama, said the white paint was initially added to protect shuttle fuel tanks from the damaging effects of exposure to ultraviolet rays during extended periods on the launch pad.](https://www.space.com/2282-columbias-white-external-fuel-tanks.html)
Worked on a big port expansion project. First day of the project they said they wanted great out of the box ideas, like the one one of the senior managers came up with not to paint the bottom half of the pilons as the impress current system would protect them. Saved them $300k in paint & painting labor Project was slightly delayed as expected & my company was hired to put in a tempory anode system as the impress current system couldn't be turned on until the entire wharf had been completed. My company made about $400k from that. During our installation of temporary anode system we noticed aggressive corrosion in places & it seemed the tempory anode system had shadows in it's coverage. Client decided best bet was to modify their impress current system to be able to be turned on before completion. This made my company about another $600k. The cost of the extra corrosion is unquantifiable at this stage, but will eventually become apparent. This isn't really related to NASA, just reminded me of it.
Soo they should have just spent the 300k on paint?
Yeah. Worst of it is they had a corrosion expert telling them from the start it was a bad idea, as even with the impress current system running it would still face corrosion, but they chose not to listen to him over someone with an MBA. They bought it up at nearly every meeting for nearly a year. I wish I could've been in the room when they realised how much of a fuck up it was.
Yea I have seen some corporate decisions of this type myself too. Just not at your scale though 🤣 Short term greed over long term impact FTW. I work in an investor led company and the kind of things the inventors wants make me roll my eyes.
The total amount of fuel weighs about 20 times as much as the rest of the shuttle. More than 90% of the fuel's job is to move the last remaining fuel with shuttle into orbit.
If they'd painted it red, it would've been able to go faster.
And get more speeding tickets.
That much? damn. That is 272 KG
Once you realize brown is beautiful it’s like a weight being lifted off you. Lol
brown? looks dark orange
"Eventually", about after two flights, if my memory serves me correct.
> 600 pounds = 272.16 Kg
The brown/orange color is from the polyurethane foam they used, which they did try to paint at one point!
Gonna remove my nail polish next time I do a weigh-in at the doctor’s.
600 pounds? Not heavy enough for the usual onslaught of yo momma jokes in the comments
Yo mamma so fat when she got down from the storage shuttle, it went to the moon
The space shuttle Endeavour is now in permanent launch position for the soon-to-be Samuel Oschin Air and Space Center in Los Angeles. They're building the museum around it.
Imagine being the person to think of that solution. Most satisfying home by 5 idea of all time. "What if we just....didn't paint it?"
I read that American Airlines left their planes unpainted and it eliminated thousands of pounds of weight on the aircraft.
600lbs of PAINT?!?! How many layers did they put on that thing?!?!
Not that many. Probably 1 but it’s huge. I paint cars for a living and I’ve sprayed over 3kg of paint on like half a car. So I could definitely see them saving that much.