On 3/30/2018 7:59 PM, jbeattie wrote:
On Friday, March 30, 2018 at 11:01:21 AM UTC-7, Andre Jute wrote:
On Thursday, March 29, 2018 at 6:31:01 AM UTC+1, James wrote:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/a...-s-super-wood/

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JS

Interesting. I once built a 68ft racing yacht out of moulded layers of veneer. It was immensely strong and semi-permanent (the hull is still in commercial service in the China Sea) at a time when the only alternatives were glass-reinforced-plastic which was likely to delaminate within a decade, or wooden planking over hefty frames (my hull required zero bracing, being stiff enough by its curvature, so that the bulkheads were placed where they were required to support masts or to meet watertight compartment regulations). I was so impressed that I put a section on building automobile chasses out of wood in my book on prototype design.

However, I wonder if this particular wood technology will ever come down to bicycles, or at least to bicycles that look like the bicycles the usual luddites expect. The current method of making the most beautiful wooden bicycles is by moulded tubes, either made and machined down in halves and bonded, or as wrap-around strips of veneer on a foam core (I'm not even aware of a commercial application of the latter).

A compression method, as described in the article you cite, would either result in heavy solid rods that would horrify the weight weenies, or require expensive, sturdy, steel or possibly reinforced concrete, molds for half-tubes, and then bonding, which would be very costly at a time when, according to an article Andrew Muzi cited the other day, titanium production costs could be falling drastically.

On the other hand, of course, a bicycle doesn't *have* to be built out of hollow tubes. The Australian industrial designer, Marc Newson, to take just one example, designed a very beautiful bicycle cast in foamed aluminium as a single H-section S-shape running from the head tube to the stubby seat tube, down to the bottom bracket, and from there back to the rear frame end. Something like that would require only one, albeit large, mould to be made in this solidified wood, and could possibly offer a weight advantage. See
http://marc-newson.com/mn-bicycles/

There is this big push lately to make things out of wood -- even large buildings. https://www.architecturaldigest.com/...lding-portland I think the forest products industry wants to make wood the new steel.

Rather than rebranding wood, we should get our materials scientists to develop some process that turns plastic bags filled with dog **** into some super-material. Or maybe old tires or nuclear waste. Why aren't we squeezing old newspapers into some product stronger than titanium? I'm not excited about finding new ways to process trees.

-- Jay Beattie.


No idea about bags of dog poop but depleted uranium recycles
into a very useful .556:

https://answers.yahoo.com/question/i...3182814AAvJcgD

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Andrew Muzi
www.yellowjersey.org/
Open every day since 1 April, 1971