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Chainsaw-wielding Robotic Submarine
merryprankster writes "New Scientist is running a story about Sawfish, a chainsaw-wielding
robotic submarine used as an underwater lumberjack. There are some 200
million trees thought to be standing on the floor of hydropower reservoirs worldwide.
Sawfish attaches airbags to, and cuts around 9 trees an hour - the trees then float
to the surface for collection. Cue the jokes about robotic high heels, suspenders
and a bra."
So, besides the cool tech issues, and clearing waterways of obstructions, the big deal here is that almost all of the old growth forests are gone. It is nigh impossible to find lumber that has grown slow and does not have knots in it anymore. In fact, Aladdin homes used to advertise back in the 20's and 30's that they would pay you a dollar for every knot you were able to find in the lumber they used to construct your home, but now....
At any rate, this old growth wood that is at the bottom of lakes and rivers has become quite prized for high end furniture, musical instruments and other applications where modern lumber does not cut it (*Snicker*), so developing robotics like this should have quite the payoff.
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Finally, we have a way of defending ourselves against those damn robotic sharks.
No, no... too silly! Stop the post!
All it needs now is frickin' laser beams, and it'll be the most EVIL contraption this side of Britney Spears.
I'm having some really weird thoughts of the Underwater Texas Chainsaw Massacre... /obvious and stupid
The trees that have been in cold water the longest make some of the best wood in the world. Apparently, these was/is an effort to get some sunken wood from the bottom of Lake Superior that went down with logging ships long ago.
Great idea. Hope it's not one of the ugly big corporations that Michael hates so much that is doing it. And for god's sake, let's hope nobody actually makes an EVIL profit off of it. Right, Michael?
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
Triton Logging has been harvesting them for years by sending divers down with chainsaws and then hoisting the waterlogged trunks to the surface
Not just suspenders and a bra, more a full on scuba gear! ooooh, Neoprene! Kinky!
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Sure this situation sounds like a win - win situation, but considering that most of the hydropower reservoirs are a minumum of several years old, many underwater animals have built their habitats among those submerged trees, and what will they do if we chop them down ? .. we've already made this mistake on the surface... should we do in the ocean as well ?
It cuts down the trees growing underwater? Whenever I try to grow trees underwater, they don't grow very well. I must be doing something wrong...
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Up here in Vermont, some guys made news a couple of summers ago by building a homemade submarine out of welded-together propane tanks(!) with trolling motors for propulsion. They were actually making some good money by going into some of the deep ponds here, attaching cables to long-ago fallen trees and hoisting them to the surface. Since the deep water is so low in oxygen, the trees are well preserved, and after propper drying yield some excellent lumber.
Found some pics here.
actually the wood is very well preserved. I used to live with a carpenter, and he used to use that kind of wood. The cost per board foot is can be 3-4x what it normally would be in a lumber yard if your lucky.
:)
I wish I could explain the biology to you, but I can't. Something about the fact the water doesn't move much at the bottom the lake (as opposed to a river), it's fresh water (as opposed to salt), and the type of wood (cedar works well and oak preserve really well), and you have old growth lumber that is amazingly well preserved.
Oh, and if you used it on a deck, you deserve to be beaten by said deck for wasting such good wood.
Now, if that makes sense to anyone, could you please explain it to me? I think I've confused myself.
More here.
Triton Logging Company Engineering Page has a photo of what is presumably the Sawfish submarine.
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(darn, I forgot to close a quote.
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Scale it down and this could be the next killer bath toy for kids.
If you're gonna build a deck today, check out some of the composite materials that are available. I saw someone building once, was surprised that they could cut it with a saw, pound nails through it, etc, but that it was mostly plastic. I found one online, but I'm sure there are many others.
With the rapid depletion of old wood, it should be reserved for high-end furniture, instruments, etc. This is a fantastic alternative for outside use!
... I have NO IDEA what "Cue the jokes about robotic high heels, suspenders and a bra" is supposed to mean. I feel strangely inadequate; I'm usually way ahead of the rest of you with the references to Lumberjack Crossdressing Porn.
I'm not normally an irrational zealous dickhead, but I figure "When in Rome..."
where are the endangered underwater robot pygmy owls supposed to nest?
Imagine a time of chaos...
OMFG we're in a bad sci-fi movie!
(shit, we don't even need the robotic chainsaw sharks to make it scary... its scary enough already).
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For all I know you went from 735 million acres of old-growth forest in 1920 to 749 million acres of the modern spongy fast-grown pine now.
My house (in Canada) is 75% old-growth pine. I cannot find any knots in the old stuff, and it's about as hard as granite, while the new stuff is like sponge. I've had to drill holes through the old-growth joists, and the the spade drill just about glows red by the time it's made its way through the old joists. I'm not exaggerating. The wood ends up scorched black and smoking from the ten minutes of fierce drilling that it takes to get through it.
Yes, absolutely. To save the forest, use plastic, because depleting the amount of oil in the world is just fine. It's someone elses problem.
If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.
$1 per tree? You're kidding right? Go to a lumber yard some time and check out prices. Then remember this is cheap wood, taken from young trees. Old growth wood is quite rare since we've cut most of it down and done a poor job maintaining the forests (planting too many trees and putting out all the fires). So old growth wood fetches top dollar. Also, old growth trees are LARGE, and most of the wood is quality. You get a good yeild on them.
They'll be able to make plenty of profit per tree, probably over $100 each, after expenses.
this thing might just pay its own way. You'd be surprised at what woodworkers (in the US at least) will pay for old growth lumber, especially for hardwoods. Not to mention municipalties on rivers that want their shipping channels cleared out. I've seen people bid thousands of dollars for a single tree. Consider that a hundred years ago, it was not uncommon to see doors made out of a single slab of chestnut, for example; such things are incredibly rare these days.
C|N>K
Ever been in the Santa Cruz area, south of San Francisco? All the redwood forests look very pretty. They give the impression of hosting tons of wildlife, and being very ancient. Both impressions are completely false. The Santa Cruz forests were actually completely cut down in order to rebuild San Francisco after the 1906 quake. (Redwood is the best structural wood there is, being extremely resistant to termite damage.) But after nearly a century natural, there are as many trees as there ever were. So the damage is undone right?
Wrong. When they cut down the forest, they eliminated a habitat, and a lot of biodiversity simply went away. It'll come back too, eventually -- but not in another 100 years, and probably not in a thousand.
There's more to forest management than just keeping the tree count up.
Skynet will have a ton of fun with this.
Phillip
The usual solution is to get a large barge-mounted crane and pull them up by brute force, but that's expensive. So it tends not to get done until somebody wants to build something and can convince the city to let them. The bayfront clutter of pilings and rotted piers makes open shoreline look less attractive, which encourages "development". A cheaper way to remove that junk, even if it's slow, would be a big win.
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Companies are salvaging lumber from the Great Lakes also.
from the article:
"One area in the Great Lakes where a team of horses ... went through the ice with a load of logs ... the skeletal remains of the horse are still there, harness, logs and all."
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I wonder what the buyers of expect to get per tree?
Look here or here.
My dad's a woodworker, and he's looked into buying some of the wood for it's overall quality, and some of its VERY unique graining and colouring.
The higher end wood was priced at over $1,000 per board foot (CDN), with the "cheap" high-end stuff being around $200 per board foot. When you consider that a single log (on average) has thousands of board feet in them, the profits are WAY more than $1 per tree!
I wish I could find the pics of some of the finished products, but if you go here you can see some of the graining of the recovered logs.
There was one 35 foot long board-room table I saw that was $120,000, and it LOOKED like it was worth every penny. It was incredible.
A lot of the local governments are starting to jump in and try and get ownership of the underwater resources, like in Michigan. There's SERIOUS money in it.
$0.02 (CDN)
How much margin do we have left? I dunno. There are many arguments, but probably the only way to know for sure is to keep pushing until the planet ceases to be habitable. Which will certainly settle the argument, but which isn't very practical!
You remind me of an old ethnic joke. In these politically correct times, I can't be specific about the ethnic affiliation of our Straight Man -- insert whoever you stereotype as terminall stupid.
Anyway, the SM goes and jumps off the Empire State building just to see what its like. As he's passing the tenth floor, he thinks, "I heard this was dangerous, but so far it's just plain fu..."
At my parent's lake house in Marble Falls, Texas, there is a stump in the cove that usually sits about a foot under the surface, and has caused many a boater to lose props or get holes punched in their boats. Usually someone in the area will mark it with a floater, so it's easy to avoid, but that hasn't stopped the faithful from trying to get rid of the hazard alltogether.
One weekend while up there, I had friends of mine who are Scuba divers don their gear, and try to use a large hacksaw to try and remove it. They came back with 5 chewed up hacksaw blades, and low on air.
About every few years or so, the LCRA will let the lake level down (it's a constant level lake, a dam on each end) so that homeowners can go out and clear out their lakefront property where the lake usually would be. Over the years we've seen folks try chainsaws, winches, fire, and even explosives to get rid of that hard Cypress stump, to no avail.
So, to this day, that stump remains vigilant and intact.
There are some pretty big misunderstandings there... First of all, very little of American forest is old growth, at least speaking from the perspective of someone from Indiana, where we have millions (around 4.5) of acres of forest, but only 2000 of those acres are old growth. And I know the situation is similar in most states, if not quite as bad as here. (And old growth is a misnomer anyway; it can mean different things to different people - there are several useful definitions for the term, and merely being old does not under all definitions automatically make a forest "old growth" - it has more to do with the condition of the forest and the type of trees, I think) Second of all, citing a number from 1920 doesn't really help. 1920 was within like 10 years of the minimum forestation (at least for Indiana, I am sure it is similar elsewhere) - they had in our case already ripped up the vast majority of forest in the state and almost all of the old growth forest (basically all old growth forest had been logged by 1930). Since then much land RELATIVELY had been reforested (often not intentionally, so the new forest is only due in part to that 7% "planted by man"), but the vast majority of the damage was already done, and NONE of the new forest by definition will be old growth. And in fact there was still considerable deforestation after that time, but so much forest was added that it hides alot of that. (By the way, most estimates are the Indiana used to be around 80% forest; a quick check on google gave me numbers of around 20% current forestation - which is UP from the 1920 number. And that 80% consisted of significant amounts of old growth - though note it was not exclusively what would be called "old growth" by most people - and now old growth is well less than 1%.)
I should also point out that hydroelectric reservoirs are, by definition, artificial habitats, and any fish adapting to them are, also by definition, an introduced species.
My brother and collected Christmas trees one year to dump in a pond we occasionally fished in. We had brim out the yazoo that summer.
Clark's Hill Reservoir, near where I grew up, has lots of submerged trees in it. When water levels fluctuate in the summer, boats collide with treetops where there shouldn't be treetops. Hopefully, this sort of work could make for safer lakes in the process.
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