A Chemical Bath and a Hot-press Can Transform Wood Into a Material That is Stronger Than Steel, Researchers Find (nature.com) 251
The process, and others like it, could make the humble material an eco-friendly alternative to using plastics and metals in the manufacture of cars and buildings, Nature reported this week. From the report: "It's a new class of materials with great potential," says Li Teng, a mechanics specialist at the University of Maryland in College Park and a co-author of the study published on 7 February in Nature. Attempts to strengthen wood go back decades. Some efforts have focused on synthesizing new materials by extracting the nanofibres in cellulose -- the hard natural polymer in the tubular cells that funnel water through plant tissue. Li's team took a different approach: the researchers focused on modifying the porous structure of natural wood. First, they boiled different wood types, including oak, in a solution of sodium hydroxide and sodium sulfite for seven hours. That treatment left the starchy cellulose mostly intact, but created more hollow space in the wood structure by removing some of the surrounding compounds. These included lignin, a polymer that binds the cellulose. Then the team pressed the block -- like a panini sandwich -- at 100C (212F) for a day. The result: a wooden plank one-fifth the thickness, but three times the density of natural wood -- and 11.5 times stronger. Previous attempts to densify wood have improved the strength by a factor of about three to four.
Loudspeakers (Score:2)
This oughta make something awesome possible. From enclosures to cones. I'm betting this stuff is hell on a skilsaw.....
Tensile vs Shear (Score:2)
From the summary:
The process, and others like it, could make the humble material an eco-friendly alternative to using plastics and metals in the manufacture of cars and buildings, Nature reported this week. From the report:
There's a reason that we don't build cars and buildings (and other things that need flex) from brittle substances.
Science News (Score:5, Informative)
There is also a summary here [sciencenews.org] at Sciences News.
Cost and workability vs strength (Score:5, Interesting)
Generally solid wood is a good choice for many projects due to three key reasons:
1. Cost
2. Workability; can be worked with hand tools and power tools, glues easily and strong
3. Water safe for years with no significant prep work
Steel is a lot stronger per pound, but to join it you either need to use mechanical fasteners or weld it. This requires expensive ($300+) specialized equipment like a welder and/or drill press. Wooden boats are generally good from 15-20 years without major renovations, and are serviceable with major repairs every 10-15 years up to 60-75 years after initial construction. Steel needs to be galvanized, or painted, or sanded and resurfaced every 2-5 years, especially in a saltwater environment (most of the things in your house arrived from asia in a big steel boat).
Super dense wood that's lost most of it's lignin likely is hyper brittle and doesn't machine well. Also, I can only imagine what happens when it's immersed in water. There's a non-zero chance it swells up like a dry sponge when it comes in contact with water or even regular humidity.
Re:Cost and workability vs strength (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd also wonder how 'eco friendly' this is. Heated sodium hydroxide baths followed by pressure and more heat. Lots of extra joules and eco unfriendly chemicals in there. I suppose it could be recycled easily but so can steel and aluminum.
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And sodium hydroxide turns into salt and water if you add hydrochloric acid. So it is also pretty harmless.
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Sodium hydroxide and sodium sulfite seem eco-friendly enough: they're easily contained and recycled in practice (and NaOH is easily-neutralized). Even chicken manure is a disaster if washed into streams en masse.
Trees were the original environmental disaster. Lignin is nigh-impossible to digest; instead, one fungus developed a mechanism to bombard lignin with peroxide, eventually oxidizing a phenyl ring, creating a branched-chain starch. That's digestible via enzymes.
With a low enough moisture cont
Re:Cost and workability vs strength (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Cost and workability vs strength (Score:5, Informative)
Steel and aluminum in particular are NOT "easily recycled" - in fact that's a much more expensive process than creating engineered wood of any type by a factor nearing 100x
To use a French term: bullshit. Recycling aluminum is as easy as tossing it into the furnace. Unless you're going to claim mining the bauxite, transporting it, refining it, THEN heating it into ingots is somehow less expensive than transporting flattened cans to a mill and dumping them in the furnace.
Oh wait, you don't have to make up more bullshit. Recycling scrap aluminium requires only 5% of the energy used to make new aluminium [wikipedia.org].
For steel, only 25% of the energy needed to process raw ore is needed to remelt steel.
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We were comparing aluminum recycling as a process vs the process to make this engineered wood. It's on the order of 100+ times less energy required to achieve this product.
I'm sorry, but how do you know that? Have you actually done the math on how much energy is being consumed in each process? This process requires seven hours of boiling and then twenty-four hours of baking at boiling temperatures. It's not exactly rapid, and a lot of energy is spent just converting water into steam. But there's another problem with it, too: the end product is not recyclable. It's probably compostable, because there are basically two kinds of fungus which decompose wood, and only one kind con
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Re:Cost and workability vs strength (Score:5, Informative)
There's a reason you should have read the fucking article.
Hu says that his study’s main finding is that removing the right amount of lignin is key to maximizing performance. In his team’s experiments, removing too much of the polymer resulted in less-dense, brittle wood, suggesting that some leftover lignin is helpful in binding the cellulose fibres when they are hot-pressed. The wood was strongest when roughly 45% of the lignin was removed.
Re:Cost and workability vs strength (Score:4, Informative)
How isotropic? (a rope and a bucket of sand are both strong: but the rope is only strong in tension and the sand only in compression). What's the 'strength' to weight ratio?
For years we've been able to pump wood full of ethylene and then induce it to polymerize, What you end up with is a heavy piece of plastic inferior in almost all respects to the original wood.
As you point out, cost of working, preservation, reaction with the environment: all of these are hugely important.
Mild steel is US$500 per ton; Al is US$2000 per ton. It's the cheaper cost of manufacturing that means your beer can isn't steel any more.
Re:Cost and workability vs strength (Score:4, Insightful)
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Mild steel is US$500 per ton; Al is US$2000 per ton. It's the cheaper cost of manufacturing that means your beer can isn't steel any more.
It's also the lower cost of recycling. It's something like 1/3 the cost to recycle Aluminum, and you wind up with an alloy with identical properties to what you recycled. When you recycle steel, it becomes more brittle, and you have to add things back into it to make it useful again which only costs MORE money. When you combine that with the lower melting point of Aluminum (around a mere 1221 F) — on diesels with Aluminum components, you can literally melt a hole in your engine by cranking up the fuel
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I wonder if they could vacuum impregnate it with epoxy as an alternative to compressing it.
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Well, yes, I knew that.
What I meant was, would it make a strong material if they removed the lignin (as described in TFA), but instead of the next step being compression, it was epoxy impregnation?
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Wooden boats are generally good from 15-20 years without major renovations, and are serviceable with major repairs every 10-15 years up to 60-75 years after initial construction.
I was going to quote a counter-example of a wooden ship under constant military commission for 250 years but.. the facts agree completely with you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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In my experience, both your wooden and steel hulls will need a trip into the yard every couple of years to have bottom paint updated and every so many years they need the whole mess sanded down to the substrate and then a new epoxy barrier coat(s) applied. This amount can vary depending on marine conditions and whether or not the hull is serviced by a diver periodically to clean off marine growth. I know people who get buy 3-4 years on bottom paint with regular dive service.
Depends on the application (Score:2)
Generally solid wood is a good choice for many projects due to three key reasons:
1. Cost
2. Workability; can be worked with hand tools and power tools, glues easily and strong
3. Water safe for years with no significant prep work
Whether solid wood is cost effective depends on the application. Sometimes it's a great choice, other times there are better choices. As for workability, again it depends on what you are trying to build. As for water safe, it depends HEAVILY on what you are doing with it. I'm not about to dunk a piece of raw pine in a lake if you get what I'm saying. Most wood of any type requires some sort of coating or treatment to withstand water and remain in good condition for many years.
Steel is a lot stronger per pound, but to join it you either need to use mechanical fasteners or weld it.
??? How many wooden struc
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Rubbish, CCA has only been used since the 1930's.
Hardwoods are the reason all those old houses are still around...
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Hardwoods are the reason all those old houses are still around...
It's not either of those things. The reason those old houses are still around, to the very limited extent that they are (since most of them have been claimed by fire, flood or earthquake by now, most humans being poor at planning) is that they were built with true-dimensional lumber. A 2x6 is TWO INCHES BY SIX INCHES. Shocking, but true. They were rough-hewn sawn planks instead of smooth-milled planks, and the part they shave off so that you don't have to wear gloves while handling it made a massive differe
Kids (Score:5, Insightful)
TFS says:
> Attempts to strengthen wood go back decades.
Decades? Really? People have been firing wood and embedding carbon into its surfaces for at least 400,000 years. This author is off by at least four orders of magnitude.
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For large values of decades. 400,000 years is 40,000 decades.
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How many parsecs?
*hides*
Are you planning a Kessel run?
Energy Cost (Score:3)
Waste treatment ?, what are the by products, how do we dispose of them properly ?
Recycling of the finished product ?
Long term stability over time at different temperatures
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If the headline is correct in that it is stronger than steel then it can be allowed to be more expensive too.
Only if it lasts longer. The longevity of steel in some types of structures is actually a concern, which is why it is often subbed out for something else in concrete structures (AFAIK the worst case, mind you.)
If you got all the energy for the process from solar thermal (you should make wood while the sun shines) then this could be an appealing and eco-friendly alternative to metal or plastic for many use cases where aesthetics are relevant, like product housings. However, you have to also be able to compet
Strength Vs. Weight (Score:2)
How strong is it versus its weight? I skimmed TFA but didn't find a mention of that. This page [engineeringtoolbox.com] suggests oak, at 3x normal density, would have comparable density to aluminum. If this material is as strong as steel but as light as aluminum, that could have actual applications. I'd wonder about flammability and rotting, though. Skyscrapers or spaceships made out of wood would be pretty funny, though.
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Dear Click and Clack, My car has termites - please help!
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Dear Click and Clack, My car has termites - please help!
Dear reader,
Pest problems with your Morgan [classicdriver.com] can be addressed by any competent fumigator.
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Probably lower than regular wood. Dry wood would have pockets of air (oxygen) inside to help spread the fire. Compressed wood, probably not.
Fire resistance (Score:2)
Re:Fire resistance (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Fire resistance (Score:5, Informative)
Yes and no. The 2x4s used in standard residential framing burn quite readily. Larger timbers form a protective char [iafss.org], which, as long as it remains on the wood, protects the inner core from fire. If the timber has been specced correctly, the char does not penetrate deeply enough to compromise the structure for some time.
Steel, meanwhile, is an excellent heat conductor and therefore will start to sag as soon as the outer edge of the steel has reached a temperature that will cause sag.
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Yes and no. The 2x4s used in standard residential framing burn quite readily. Larger timbers form a protective char, which, as long as it remains on the wood, protects the inner core from fire. If the timber has been specced correctly, the char does not penetrate deeply enough to compromise the structure for some time.
If the timber has been specced correctly? That's total nonsense. Houses are made almost entirely out of 2x4s and other 2x lumber (but by far, mostly 2x4s) and 2xanythings burn just as readily as 2x4s because of how thin they are.
Building houses out of flammable materials is insane.
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Steel melts somewhere around 2,400 degrees, but loses 90% of its strength around the temperature of jet fuel fires.
How is killing trees more eco-friendly, than ... (Score:4, Interesting)
just recycling an infinitely renewable inorganic compound or metal?
I never followed that "logic".
Trees grow ridiculously slowly. And no, you can't just plant a few fast-growers (in a mono-culture even) and call it the same as an ancient complex forest eco system that sustained tens of thousands of species in an elegant balance of cycles!
Meanwhile, metals and generally crystals and materials made from ore are easily recycled in a single day, with some smelting and forging, using only solar energy from places where nothing lives anyway.
"Stronger than steel" is silly anyway. Steel is not very strong. And what do you mean with that word anyway? There's half dozen things that that can mean, and in none is steel quite the best we have. Steel is only popular, because it is very abundant and very cheap, with acceptable properties.
Using trees for building things (apart from decorative furniture and the likes) is as stupid as using fields to grow crops to then turn them into gasoline instead of food.
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Because if your metal goes in the trash, it doesn't come back. The wood doesn't have to be transported or stored in any special way to be renewed.
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Because if your metal goes in the trash, it doesn't come back.
Can you explain this? It's not like you click on "empty trashcan" and the metal is deleted. That trash is taken somewhere and emptied into something. It doesn't vanish. It can come back.
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In some places landfill mining is already being do
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Even more stupid, at least in the short term, but in the long term, this might actually make sense (whereas ethanol as a fuel will never make sense).
Imagine this world a few thousand years from now. We've run out of metals suitable for building things, because they're all in use for something. If you want to build a new building, you hav
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A writer of SF stories who does not know from what our planet is composed ...
Uh, oh!
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Good luck digging that deeply, unless you remove the moon, move our entire planet away from the sun a few AUs, and wait billions of years for the radioactive material inside to fully decay so that the core won't be so hot. :-)
If you assume that materials are distributed evenly, then you're right that we won't every truly run out, but that isn't a re
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By the time we're building a Dyson sphere (or more likely, a Dyson swarm), we should be able to cannibalize the planet Mercury. It's basically just an iron-nickel core with most of the rock blasted away.
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By the time we're building a Dyson sphere
Out of what, wood? This material sounds like just the thing...
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Poplars grow straight and 50 feet tall in 3 years sometimes.
We really need to regulate tree farms. There's a lot of cutting of useless forests down in Florida and Virginia--the wood is bent and hollow, no good for anything--and they pretty much use a poorly-written law to get government subsidies for treating the entire natural wetland as "waste product", selling biomass pellets to Europe, and replanting with pine. We should have Federal laws and regulators to ensure logging restores the original habita
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just recycling an infinitely renewable inorganic compound or metal?
I never followed that "logic".
Trees grow ridiculously slowly. And no, you can't just plant a few fast-growers (in a mono-culture even) and call it the same as an ancient complex forest eco system that sustained tens of thousands of species in an elegant balance of cycles!
Carbon also gets locked up in trees... whilst trees grow, that's carbon out of the atmosphere. Where wood is used to build houses (that's carbon out of the atmosphere)... Yes, obviously it takes burning fuel to build those houses and prep that wood... but it takes even more with steel.
Trees may grow slowly, but that's all for the best- they provide a habitant for wildlife whilst they grow (regrettably mono-culture isn't the best for wildlife), This also means you need more hectares to get enough for buil
Before you start building cars with it (Score:2)
lets make sure the QA teams test to see if rodents love the taste of it or not this time around please.
It was a minor oversight when they switched to Eco-Friendly wire insulation and became an expensive :|
problem once the rodents learned how amazing it tasted
Thanks for the analogy. (Score:5, Funny)
Then the team pressed the block -- like a panini sandwich -- at 100C
People who read news for nerds might not be able understand what pressing a block means in this context. A highly accurate and technical description, make it so readily comprehensible. Like a panini sandwich! Good, someone might mistake pressed the block something like a burger or a calzone. One might even be thinking of pasta or pilaf or masala dosa. Now it is clear. Press the block like a panini sandwich. Good. Great job.
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How strong is it in shear? (Score:4, Informative)
Glass fibers are also stronger than steel in tension, but they're weaker in compression and absolutely suck in shear (loading perpendicular to the fibers). The fibers just bend sideways instead of offering any resistance. So we embed them in a matrix of plastic (polyester or epoxy) to create fiberglass. Tensile and compressive strength are reduced, but shear strength improves substantially - enough to where you can walk on a fiberglass board whereas raw glass fibers would simply flop over and let you fall through. Where a fiber used to bend, the plastic matrix absorbs and transmits those forces to other fibers, converting shear forces into tension and compression (the board bows downward in the middle, compressing in the top half, stretching in the bottom half).
It sounds like what this team has done is taken wood, and cooked it so the cellulose fibers remain but much of the matrix which holds them together has been removed. That has little consequence in tension, but could weaken shear strength to where the material is structurally useless except as rope/cable.
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Take this "treated, cooked, and compressed" wood, and use it to make plywood.
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Take this "treated, cooked, and compressed" wood, and use it to make plywood.
So we're taking wood and treating, cooking, and compressing it, then we're gluing it together. How close have we gotten to the lifetime energy consumption of an Aluminum honeycomb, given that it can be recycled perpetually?
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Would you like a deck in your backyard made out of a) aluminum honeycomb, or b) 2x4s made by plywood-like construction of this new stuff?
What? Aluminum, obviously. Why is this even a debate? I'll cover it with all-weather carpet like they use on docks. It'll be lovely and it'll last basically forever.
Oak? That's not a hardwood... (Score:2)
It'd be interesting to see what comes out of this process if they'd used a [real hardwood](http://www.wood-database.com/australian-buloke/)
Baseball bats? (Score:2)
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So it's viagra? (Score:3)
A Chemical Bath and a Hot-press Can Transform Wood Into a Material That is Stronger Than Steel, Researchers Find
Why pay $15 a pill when you can just immerse in a bath of our special salts?
Warning: If you experience "steel" for longer than a few hot presses, contact your chemist immediately.
Wood will be impregnated, but does not prevent pregnancy.
May cause blue vision.
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The bodies were Duroplast [wikipedia.org] - a composite plastic.
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Re:Trabant (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Trabant (Score:5, Informative)
Trabants were partially made of plywood, weren't they?
Yes. Also, many WW2-era German, Russian, and British aircraft of many types including fighters, especially early in the war for the Soviets and late in the war for the Germans, used various types of laminated and/or compressed wood, some as a major percentage of the vehicle. The British Mosquito was one of the fastest aircraft in the WW2 sky and made the first bombing runs on Berlin due to it's speed, payload capacity, long range, and was made largely from wood. It served many different roles from heavy fighter, to twin-engine fast bomber, to fast reconnaissance, and more. Pilots loved the "Mossy". It was such a great aircraft the Germans tried to copy it, but with only limited success.
Strat
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That is incorrect.
Everyone used wood, as it is leighter, hence the planes climb faster and use less fuel.
Technology to make robust steel planes did not even exist at that time. Aluminium even less so.
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The metal Blenheim entered service in 1937.
The wooden Mosquito entered service in 1941.
Are you suggesting that at some point in between the RAF forget?
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They made those planes out of wood because they didn't have enough metal.
Lack of aluminum was an issue but the reason the all wood Mosquito was economical was that Britain had a lot of underutilized wood craftsmen during the war. Building the Mosquito would impact neither the existing workforce working with aluminum or require aluminum. Without all of the underemployed furniture makers and musical instrument makers, it would not have been economical.
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In WWII there was a plan to make enormous aircraft carriers out of Pykrete, a mix of wood pulp and ice
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Not as fundamentally daft as it sounds. Icebergs are pretty bomb resistant - hard enough to hold together, soft enough to not shatter, and enough thermal mass & latent heat to resist incendiaries.
https://www.navcen.uscg.gov/?p... [uscg.gov]
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However, nobody was really concerned about how hard they would be to sink, because there was no way to keep the Germans from sinking them if they found them
Actually the 'unsinkable' nature of pykrete ships was a selling point
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
When I had read their report, I advised my superiors to scrap our experiments with pure ice and set up a laboratory for the manufacture and testing of reinforced ice. Combined Operations requisitioned a large meat store five floors underground beneath Smithfield Market, which lies within sight of St. Paul's Cathedral, and ordered some electrically heated suits, of the type issued to airmen, to keep us warm at less than 0 degree C (32 degree F) temperatures. They detailed some young commandos to work as my technicians, and I invited Kenneth Pascoe, who was then a physics student and later became a lecturer in engineering at Cambridge, to come and help me. We built a big wind tunnel to freeze the mush of wet wood pulp, and sawed the reinforced ice into blocks. Our tests soon confirmed Mark and Hohenstein's results. Blocks of ice containing as little as four percent wood pulp were weight for weight as strong as concrete; in honor of the originator of the project, we called this reinforced ice "pykrete". When we fired a rifle bullet into an upright block of pure ice two feet square and one foot thick, the block shattered; in pykrete the bullet made a little crater and was embedded without doing any damage. My stock rose, but no one would tell me what pykrete was needed for, except that it was for Project Habakkuk.
* I Wish I'd Made You Angry Earlier, Perutz, Max
A good deal of consideration, much of it highly technical, was also given to the feasibility of building floating platforms which could either be used by fighters to support opposed landings until such time as airfields ashore were available, or act as staging points for ferrying aircraft over long distances. The idea as originally conceived by a member of Combined Operations staff, and vehemently supported by Mountbatten, was that these floating platforms should be constructed out of icebergs. They would be provided with engines which would enable them to steam at slow speed, and with refrigeration plants to prevent them melting. They would be unsinkable. The whole thing seemed completely fantastic, but the idea was not abandoned without a great deal of investigation. Various alternative methods of construction were then considered by the United States naval authorities, but in the end there was general agreement that carriers and auxiliary carriers would serve the same purpose more effectively."
* The Memoirs of Lord Ismay, Ismay, General Lord
The other intriguing property was that they could be made so large that conventional bombers could land, refuel and take off from them. Even now aircraft carriers have very strict limits on what aircraft they can support - the planes need to be navalised so they can survive short takes offs and landings. The selling point of an Pykrete ship was that you could land a heavy bomber, refuel it and have it t
Re:Trabant (Score:5, Informative)
In 1940 I could at least fly as far as Glasgow in most of my aircraft, but not now! It makes me furious when I see the Mosquito. I turn green and yellow with envy. The British, who can afford aluminium better than we can, knock together a beautiful wooden aircraft that every piano factory over there is building, and they give it a speed which they have now increased yet again. What do you make of that? There is nothing the British do not have. They have the geniuses and we have the nincompoops. After the war is over I'm going to buy a British radio set – then at least I'll own something that has always worked.
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After the war is over I'm going to buy a British radio set â" then at least I'll own something that has always worked.
And speaking of British radio sets, Mullard, a now-defunct British maker of vacuum tubes, were and still are a world standard for vacuum tubes. Old-stock "new" original Mullards go for ridiculous prices these days among audiophiles and electric guitarists and are quickly scooped up, when they can be found at all.
There are current-production tubes labeled "Mullard" but the rights to the brand name were acquired by a Russian company called Sovtek who market tubes under several brand names, including other now
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It must have been very impressive to outperform other aircraft before it even existed.
Re:Trabant (Score:5, Informative)
In WW2 the British built a multi-role military aircraft called the "Mosquito" out of plywood. Originally conceived as a very fast lightweight bomber, it was a brilliant success at a wide variety of tasks: night fighter, high altitude interceptor, ground attack craft, photo-reconnaissance craft, torpedo bomber.
Basically it was the anti-F35: designed to do one thing well, it ended up doing everything pretty well.
Re: Trabant (Score:4, Informative)
The chassis of Morgan sports cars (just about all that remains of the UK owned car industry) are still made of ash.
Re: Trabant (Score:4, Informative)
Looks like the chassis is metal but the frame is ash:
https://www.classicdriver.com/... [classicdriver.com]
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Indeed. Sorry I've not mod points today - the frame is indeed wood, and a common thing to rot on earlier models which were not treated.
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There's a "Brexit leads to Palaeolithic" joke here somewhere, but I prefer to point out that despite the absence of 100% British mainstream, high-volume auto makers, the auto industry in the country is quite significant and that Morgan is NOT just about what's left of the car industry.
There are plants for mainstream cars from Nissan and Honda, there are R&D intensive companies making parts for all sorts of vehicles, there are companies that make composites for varied uses in motorsport and only then, ve
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Let me know when it's better than carbon fiber.
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Rubbish. What remains is cellulose, which is a carbon compound but still contains a lot of not-carbon.
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Let me know when it isn't flammable. Firefighters dread when they are called to 'modern' wood structures, whose lightweight construction fails rapidly when exposed to flame. That neat high-tech truss with its gang-nail plates will collapse in just minutes. That's why sprinklers should be required in new construction houses.
Modern wood structures CAN be safer than steel with very little added cost. The wood is given flame retardant and can actually maintain structural integrity better than steel. Steel tends to warp and lose strength well below it's melting point- and below what it takes modern treated wood to burn. If properly treated wood is SAFER than steel in a fire.
Re:Congratulations. (Score:4, Informative)
You just invented plywood!
Plywood is weaker than normal wood not stronger and definitely not stronger than steel.
Not when sandwiched vertically in a weight-bearing truss.
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You just invented plywood!
Plywood is weaker than normal wood not stronger and definitely not stronger than steel.
Plywood that is weaker than wood exists. However the vast majority of the product is built and selected because it is stronger and more stable than wood. The greater the number of plys, the stronger it gets. Sure it has some weaknesses like bending strength but the trade off is a no-brainer. For nearly every applicable purpose, after crisscrossing the grain at 90 degrees and lamination its structural strength, resistance to warping, and and moisture resistance is vastly enhanced when compared to solid w
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particle board wins hands down in terms of cost.
wood chips + glue = cheap
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No, chipboard and particle board are the same thing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Also known as low-density fibreboard
What you're thinking of is medium density fibreboard, aka MDF [wikipedia.org]
I think MDF is actually stronger than particle board. Just never get it wet or it swells up and falls apart. Particle board doesn't tend to swell up but eventually the glue fails and it flakes away like weet bix [wikipedia.org]
Oriented Strand Board (Score:2)
No, wood chips and glue are called waferboard or chipboard.
That is called Oriented Strand Board (or OSB for short) [wikipedia.org] here in the US. I'm not sure I've ever heard anyone use the terms waferboard or chipboard on this side of the pond.
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Near as I can tell, the word sturdy, in the hands of furniture marketers, has become the exact opposite of what we normally take it to mean. Any pi
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MDF .... is almost a perfect material to build speaker-cases from.
That's not the reason they use it.
The reason is that it doesn't resonate.
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Well what do you expect, real wood is expensive to make, it's not like real that stuff just grows on trees.
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You mean chipboard? One step up from papier mache?
Re: (Score:2)
It sounds like a modified recipe for Masonite (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masonite)
"Masonite swells and rots over time when exposed to the elements, and may prematurely deteriorate when it is used as exterior siding. In 1996, International Paper (IP) lost a class action suit brought by homeowners whose Masonite siding had deteriorated. The jury found that IP's Masonite siding was defective"
Let's hope its properties are somewhat different
Re: (Score:2)
I initially read that as detonate and wondered why anyone would use explosive siding.
Re:More food for the lower life forms? (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh, it gets much better than that. From Wikipedia:
Similar to fiberglass, Duroplast has limited possibilities for efficient disposal. As discarded Trabants began to fill junkyards, disposing of the bodies inspired creative solutions. One of these was developed by a Berlin biotechnology company, who experimented with a bacterium that would consume the body in 20 days.[2][3] Urban legends, depicted in the movie Black Cat White Cat and described in a song by the Serbian band Atheist Rap, described recycling Duroplast by
feeding the cars to pigs, sheep and other farm animals.
Duroplast flavored bacon? Yum, yum!
After the Berlin Wall fell, Germans voted with their wallets on how they felt about Duraplast cars. Although, the Trabi was overall a crappy car, so it wasn't just the Duroplast. It's amusing that just across the border, the West Germans were building BMWs and Porsches.
That shows you how bad communism is. Under communism, you can take take a nation of Germans, and only make crappy cars with them.
Re: (Score:2)
However in east germany the communists managed to give every one: ...
o education he was capable of
o housing and clothing
o a job, for his entire life
o a kindergarden place for every kid
o jobs for women, because of above
and plenty of other things
We have not even NOW in west germany a kindergaeden place for every kid, even so that it is demanded by law since a few years and you can sue your town to provide one.
Re: (Score:2)
However in east germany the communists managed to give every one: ...
o education he was capable of
o housing and clothing
o a job, for his entire life
o a kindergarden place for every kid
o jobs for women, because of above
and plenty of other things
We have not even NOW in west germany a kindergaeden place for every kid, even so that it is demanded by law since a few years and you can sue your town to provide one.
Yeah, don't get me wrong. I'm glad to live in the West, in a democracy and free from religious oppression; but some of these "backwards" places do have their shining moments. You mentioned the communists above... I will point out another unlikely source of "socialist utopia"... the lands controlled by Islamic State. OK... so yeah, you can get your head cut off for worshipping incorrectly... but.
Free housing for anyone who couldn't afford their own. Free clothing for anyone who couldn't afford their own.
Re: (Score:3)
The Germans make average to decent cars. Where they excel is in the marketing and advertising.
Throughout most of automotive history and up into the early sixties, America made the best vehicles and did the most to push automotive technology, not that it was that much.
In the late sixties and seventies, nobody except maybe the Swedes could touch the Germans on any level. Not in build quality, not in performance, not in interior quality, period. It was Europe's time to shine. Parts of it, anyway.
From the eighties through the mid to late nineties, nobody could even begin to compete with the Japanese. Sy