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Top Gadget of 2006 — The HurriQuake Nail
eldavojohn writes "Popular Science is naming its Best of What's New of 2006 and the one at the top doesn't have much to do with circuitry or computers. Instead, it's a nail. Not your average nail though, the HurriQuake nail [flash] spent six years in development." From the article: "As the Bostitch team tweaked the head-to-shank ratio, Sutt and metallurgist Tom Stall worked on optimizing high-carbon alloys, trying to find the highest-strength trade-off between stiffness and pliability — the key to preventing snapped nails. 'Meanwhile,' Sutt says, 'we were focusing on how to keep the nail from pulling out.' The team machined a series of barbed rings that extend up the nail's shaft from its point, experimenting with the size and placement of the barbs. 'You want the rings to have maximum holding power,' he says, 'but if they go up too high, it creates a more brittle shank that shears more easily.'"
The team machined a series of barbed rings that extend up the nail's shaft from its point
Boat Nails have been around quite a while; barbs on nails is not new.
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Gee, nice Bostich commercial. Never heard of a ring shank nail? Try driving one. I've bought hundreds of thousands of tons of nails, I'll tell you there is a lot more to a nail than meets the eye. Not all nails are shot from nail guns, the nails on framing anchors have to be driven by hand . There's the angle on the chisel point, bending but not breaking, checkered heads, rust resistant coatings, uniformity, AND price. Nails are a commodity.
Haven't spent much time in construction, have we? Through college, I spent a couple summers framing houses. The days were long, and you'd come home exhausted, but you had to absolutely work your butt off if you wanted to come in on budget and actually make a buck after paying labor. Of course, I was one of the labor, but it was a small, family company I was working for, so I got an idea of how the business side actually worked. Screws are *slow* to install, compared with a guy and a nail gun. When every extra minute is eating into the bottom line, the extra time it would have taken to use screws would have "screwed" us.
Non-removable nails don't sound that bad to me - once you knew what the hell you were doing, you didn't screw up much, particularly with a nail gun that drove nails in so deep you couldn't easily get them out anyway. If you missed by a small amount, you generally just threw in another nail and left the first one (bent over, of course, if it was sticking out). If they hold better and fit in the ol' nail gun, bring them on!
But, not everyone has a screw gun. OTOH, even though nail guns are wildly popular, they might not be able to handle the oversize head on those nails.
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One of the primary purposes of sheathing is to brace the wall against sheer forces. A square plate and stud wall has no strength against sheer forces unless it's braced diagonally corner to corner. Plywood sheathing properly attached acts as that diagonal brace. Otherwise the top and bottom plates are free to slide parallel to each other and turn the wall into a parallelogram.
This
Are you aware that local governments already set construction standards? Or do you think that companies should just be able to build whatever, whenever and however, without regard for safety? Have you never heard of Mrs. O'Leary's Cow (please, I know that it was an apocryphal story)?
The thing that burns in a house fire is the contents. It doesn't really matter if the house is fireproof or not, the contents will burn just as well. If the occupants aren't prepared, they will die just as well in a fireproof house. In urban areas, most house fires don't result in irreperable damage to the structure.
Most municipalities have laws that require smoke detectors in every dwelling. It is also standard to require construction that prevents a burning house from igniting its neighbor. The result is that death by housefire is far behind death by traffic accident. http://www.benbest.com/lifeext/causes.html
As far as being permanent, wooden structures last forever, as long as they are kept dry. Check out the thousand year old timber churches in Scandanavia.
The odor problem comes about because we permit all kinds of nasty things in our building materials and consumer products. Carpets and particle board are major offenders. Maybe what you're smelling is formaldyhide.
I haven't seen too many concrete slabs or foundations blow away. Sill bolts are usually 1/2" or 5/8" tempered steel and a properly designed... or rather, a properly *built* house will have sufficient numbers of bolts to distribute the weight evenly and prevent pull out. And as the article states: Home owners will love the innovation and the marginal increase in cost but builders will hate it; not only because removing a nail will be ridiculously difficult, but also because homes that don't fall down don't have to be re-built. If you make your money building homes and you build homes that last forever, then you will eventually become obsolete. The trend since the 1950's has been to build homes using progressively cheaper materials with progressively shorter lifespans. It's called 'progress' because the cost of building homes decreases (subject to market pressures) and more and more people can 'afford' to live in the suburbs. In reality, this trend simply fosters a cycle of increasing consumer debt, both because you now need a car to drive the extra distance to work every day, and because your home is in a constant state of degradation and needs to be maintained. Add to that the idea of 'keeping up with the Joneses': that you have to have a car and home that are as nice or nicer than your neighbours' instead of living both within your means and within practicality and you have a culture that is ripe for widespread debt and economic stagnation. Or worse, you get stagflation where the economy stagnates but prices continue to increase, now your loaf of bread costs a dollar fifty instead of a dollar but you still have the same income so you've got to trim 50 cents from your budget somewhere else. It happened in the UK in the 60s and 70s and here in the US and Canada in the 70s and 80s and it'll happen again, sooner rather than later.
Lose: misplace or fail || Loose: not bound together
I knew that someone would bring this point up.
It seems to make sense right?
Unfortunately, the fact is that manufactured/modular homes are of the worst quality made almsot entirely by people who are not carpenters.
I should group tract homes into this category too, but I don't want to waste a lot of time on slashdot explaining why.
Basically, there are two kinds of buildings. Those built by idiots/ built for profit, and those buildings that are built custom to live in or to be directly used by the person paying for the construction. Guess which building type turns out to be of higher quality almost every time.
Though, let me not miss the point. I do agree with the main part of your post. Building stick frame homes is slow, and perhaps stupid. I'm just pointing out that it is the quality of construction that matters more than anything. Building with Logs, bricks, cement, glass, steele can be great, or it can be dumb too. It might depend on the climate. Sometimes, ice is a great resource for building material. Context is important.
By the way, you might want to check out metal buildings. They can be built quickly, and by a couple of people. Same thing with cement buildings. Same thing with simple rectangular stick frame buildings.
Wood might look old-school, but it's a really excellent building material.
It's got a lot of strength for the weight. It's inexpensive. There are multiple ways of fastening pieces of wood together. It has good strength in compression, good strength in tension, and good bending strength. It can be worked with ordinary tools. It can be worked by hand. Running it through a saw produces relatively harmless sawdust, unlike concrete which requires a more substantial filter to remove lung-damaging silica particles. It requires no special skills to work with. It grows on trees. Defects such as knots and grain irregularities have only a minimal impact on strength. It is flexible, making it robust in winds and earthquakes.
One of the major reasons houses are blown apart by the wind is the failure of the garage door. When that door gets blown in, air can enter and pressurize the garage, which can blow the walls out or the roof off. Of course, houses can fail in other ways in a heavy wind, but often the first point of failure isn't even made of wood.
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