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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.'"
They are called screws, and they have been known for a few thousand years to be vastly better then nails. Most any floor that's nailed down squeaks for example. And if you want something really good, you use bolts.
And their "patent pending" features you'll find on most all the masonry nails in the hardware store.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
And the construction industry will beat a path to your door. Yes screws are a better fastener but they take much longer to install driving the labor costs up. This is a case where they applied complex tech to the design of something simple and improved it.
We can already build structures that will withstand any load that you can specify. The question is just one of how much you're willing to pay. The other question is one of getting the structure properly built. There's the rub.
Over the years Fine Homebuilding magazine has done post-mortems on houses that haven't survived natural disasters. http://www.taunton.com/finehomebuilding/index.asp One thing that usually stands out is substandard materials and workmanship. Usually the local building code adequately takes the expected disasters into account.
My favorite example: During Hurricane Andrew, shingles that weren't applied perfectly would lift. Rain would blow up under the shingles and soak the particle board (not plywood) roof sheathing. The sheathing would swell and the staples holding them would cut through the swollen wood (the staples weren't pulled out of the rafters). The particle board roof sheathing would blow off and, when the wind got in, that was it for the rest of the house.
So, what do I think of these marvellous new nails? We don't really need them. Some cheap builder will get an engineer to sign off on a design that uses half as many nails. A roofer won't get one of the nails in the right place and won't drive another one to compensate. The building inspector won't notice. The contractor will save ten bucks per house. Someone will die.
Why am I so cynical about contractors and tradespeople? I know building inspectors and engineers.
Even a screw gun / power driver with self-tapping screws takes a lot longer to drive each fastener, than a pneumatic nail gun. I don't think there's any way that you can drive a threaded fastener with anywhere near the speed that you can drive in a nail. In the time a person can drive in a screw, you can put in a handful of nails.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
The average contractor's response won't be "Great, I'll be buildinding something twice as strong". It will be "Great, I can use half the number of nails."
So the buildings will still fall down when a hurricane hits.
If a house is built to substandard specifications it's because the building inspectors in your municipality aren't doing their job. The standard job of a building inspector is to verify at each state of construction that the house is built properly and to specification; if the house is not built to spec, the building inspector has the power to demand that the house be torn down and rebuilt.
My parents are in the construction industry and I've seen a few times where building inspectors demanded a foundation be torn up and repoured, house framing demolished and rebuilt, and siding reapplied to a house so that it meets code.
Now in many areas of the country houses are not built to current code. But note the key word here: current. The Unform Building Code is regularly updated every two years or so, so it is possible a house built ten years ago isn't up to today's code--after five revisions to the code, eventually something is going to be considered "substandard" today that was up to code before. My house, for example, does not meet current code; today's building code in the Glendale area requires that all residental structures have an automatic sprinkler system in the house to meet today's code. But because my house was last remodeled in the 70's, there were no requirements then to install an automatic sprinkler system.
Let's do a test. (We may actually be able to do this with historical data.) Take the average European city with houses made of stones, bricks, etc. Take a similar US/Canadian city with houses made of wood. Apply a 7.9 Richter scale quake. Measure resulting destruction. Would you rather be in a 17th century English brick house on the historical register with no changes allowed? Or in a modern American wood house building-code compliant? Would you rather have a tile roof in such a situation? or maybe composition?
FYI Re: Building code compliance. I've just participated in building a few houses. The new codes are really putting the screws to earthquake construction, literally. The new braces required between foundation and joists are really incredible. Zillions of nails in each brace and every hole must be filled. Contractors amy not want to do it, but they MUST use the new techniques or they don't pass inspection. The codes are evolutionary, but hey do keep getting tougher.
FYI: Wood houses. Seattle, for example, is only 150 years old. Tere are still lots of forests here, lots of wood. Great Britain, for example, ran out of oak to build the Royal Navy ships, so one of the admirals under Lord Nelson planted a bunch of oak trees on his property in hopes there would be enough oak for the Royal Navy to build ships in 1900.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
Because houses here are built as cheaply as possible, often even using unskilled illegal-immigrant labor (not that the lazy white hicks that would be the alternative around here would be any better...). Also, we don't have the benefit of comparison to 1000 year old examples of (apparently) good construction to shame the builders into good behavior, as you do over there. In other words, our structures suck because everyone is either too lazy (workers), greedy (builders), or stupid (owners) to care.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I'm interested to hear what the Slashdot crowd has to say about them patenting this. Six years is a long time to spend researching something. I'm sure they dumped a truck of money into it. (Without reading the article,) I'm guessing that it's probably relatively reverse engineer a nail and knock it off in a Chinese factory.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
This only addresses one particular vulnerability in houses, which is external stress. This may make a house last two or three hurricanes instead of one (presuming the absence of a massive flood), and there will still be lots of rebuilding as the roof tears off or the drywall has to be patched after a quake. It's obvious that builders cannot keep up if a region is totally flattened, why would they NOT welcome this? Not to mention the mold that follows a flood or hurricane generates plenty of business without disrupting the community so much. If the entire city is trashed, your rebuilding goes REALLY slowly because you can't get your supplies, or labor (everyone else is building too). If 30% of the city is uninhabitable, you hopefully still have a working city and plenty of work for everyone. If worse comes to worse, move to Las Vegas. Lots of construction, not many calamities.
Earthquake insurers have begun in the last few years to factor in the increased cost of construction following a catastrophic earthquake. Typically they triple the labor and materials cost to account for the scarcity of both. I think they are being optimistic. Even so, this is the excuse they'll give for the rates doubling or tripling or worse in the last two years. Really it's that they mingle the disaster funds -- my earthquake premiums and your windstorm premiums pay into the same pool. Thus Katrina, with assists from Rita and Dennis (on the power play) just about drained the tank, and they need to fill it up, fast, since there is a reasonable chance things are only going to get worse.
This also fails to address the "biological clock" that governs most house lifespans -- termites. That is killing the 30-40 year old wood-frame buildings in this area at least. There are 100+ year old wood frame houses left in Los Angeles county, but they have all seen extensive work over their lives. If it's not the wood, it's the plumbing, earthquake retrofitting, insulation, quite possibly replacement of flammable roofing that will limit the practical (read: economically viable) life of a plain vanilla house. Somehow they all have conspired to fall apart at roughly the same time or at an ever-accelerating rate, much like an old car. You can theoretically keep your car running forever, so long as you can get the parts and do it (or pay someone to do it for you), but at some point it becomes economically unviable to drive that '57 Chevy to work, 50 miles a day. You end up taking it around the block once a week and driving a car that just doesn't cost you so much to maintain.
The analogy breaks down since more people can afford two cars than two houses, and a house not used still can get blown over, catch fire, get flooded, etc., but it's all I can think of right now.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
I find the whole mostly-European "the best building material is stone or concrete" idea pretty funny. So far, I've owned two houses, both wood, and both old (the previous one was built in 1937, the one I currently live in was built in 1917). Both houses will last at least a hundred more years. Of course, it is true that if they were built of stone, they might last another 1000 years. It's hard to say, but regardless they're permanent structures. I have a feeling that this is much more about the types of home you grew up in rather than what the "best" building material actually is.
The other thing is that stone and brick are definitely not fireproof. You still need beams to support the floors and those are usually wood. Here in Baltimore there are a ton of brick row houses and they occasionally have terrible fires. A small fire starts inside and burns the furniture/floors/books/whatever and that ends up catching the beams on fire and you end up with an empty brick shell. Of course, since they're row houses, the fire ends up spreading through the brick walls to the neighboring houses and you lose 3 or 4 homes at once. Even though they're made of brick. Fire is a problem for everyone.