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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 issue is not that the structures can't handle the winds. It is that the construction codes are not being followed by the builders. Construction is so poor because of cost-cutting by contractors and/or unskilled labor and cutting corners. This was true with Andrew (Miami) and continues to be true. If contractors built to the code and inspectors held them to it, alot of the damage seen would not occur. I have a house that was only 5 miles from the eye of Hurricane Charlie (140+ mph winds) and suffered minimal damage (a few pieces of soffet blown off, no shingles or other damage). But ... we watched the contractors and ensured that they did everything by the book. Neighbors saw their (oftern much more expensive) homes literally blown to the ground. Older structures (60's/70's) also saw little damage.
... just make sure the builders build to the code. Adding a better nail won't cure sloppy cost-cutting construction.
So
I don't think any house is built to standard these days. If the standard says 3 nails per stud, you're lucky to get two nails per. The resulting house is so flimsy that you can literally grab a house by the corner post after the framing in done and wobble the entire structure back and forth. Sometimes even after the sheathing in put on. Sheathing isn't supposed to be the main factor in structural stability, it's there for insulation. Housing inspectors aren't a help here. They're incredibily corrupt.
IIRC, a lot of the damage from hurricanes was to houses not built to existing code. So unless they use these nails on the builders themselves, I don't think they'll do that much good.
They are marketing these nails as superior fasteners that will withstand a high wind environment. However, they are only fasteners, and the rest of the structure is still just as vulnerable to threats such as fire, water, termites, and so forth. For a truly robust, energy efficient, and long-lasting structure, the obvious solution is concrete.
Insulating Concrete Forms are basically like Legos made out of an insulating foam. You stack them together, insert rebar, and fill with concrete. The cost is estimated at 5% more than standard wood frame houses, and are superior in every way.
As the earth warms, storms will continue to become stronger and stronger. "An Inconvenient Truth" goes into more detail, and if you haven't seen it, you really should. In any case, it is about time that we started building more durable structures.
I am not trying to annoy anyone here with this comment, just sharing an opinion. A house made of wood feels somehow un-solid (and unsafe, given the strictly positive probability of a fire that is always present). Plus, immediately after arriving in Canada (my first encounter with N. America), I was struck by the fact that all houses I visited (I was looking for a room to rent in Victoria, BC, Canada, and visited quite a few houses in my first several days there) had a strong, pungent, "chemical" smell. First I thought it has to be some commonly used cleaning substance. Later I decided that it has to be some chemicals that the wood had been treated with, probably to repel wood-eating insects or to prevent the wood from decaying. Interestingly, after having lived there for months I stopped feeling the smell -- but going back to my homeland for a vacation and then back to Canada, I would be struck by the peculiar smell again.
I realise wooden houses are cheaper and faster to build, but, IMHO, they are a poor substitute for brick-and-concrete ones.
It's a bit like asking why so many computers keep getting sold with such flimsy or poor quality components. It's all about the profit margin, and targeting a certain demographic.
People want certain amenities in their houses, but are only willing to pay a certain amount, so they go with housebuilders that meet their price points.
Of course, that means shortcuts behind the scenes, perhaps even the corruption other people here seem to say is endemic, too.
Not to mention, a lot of people are just ignorant of what goes into quality building, and some just buy a house thinking they'll move with their job in 5 years or so, anyway, so why bother?
I only know anything about home construction because I watch a lot of home repair shows. Which means I really don't know much.
I'd pay $100 or more for a real, regularly updated text that explains what the newest, best housing materials and methods are, and how to manage a builder, so that when I finally go buy a house, I can look for a builder who will build with those things. I'm sure I'll need an architect, too, but I don't even know that process, either.
Normal screws the size of nails tend to fail in shear at much lower stress. This is not bullshit.
Larger screws made out of stronger alloys don't, but are typically too big to usefully stick a 2x4 to another 2x4, or hold a sheet of plywood into a 2x4 with typical installation accuracy. And require a pre-drilled hole, which at least doubles the time to install. These screws are not useful for typical building construction tasks. Cracking the wood all to hell installing oversize nails or screws incorrectly is far from the best solution.
Wood is a hard material to join really well. You can do all sorts of half-ass methods and get two pieces of wood to stick together adequately, but doing a really good job is a lot harder. Because it's got grain and fiber, you need a lot of bearing surface to avoid the connector pulling out. Screws do great at that, but have less shear resistance, and lower cost screws are too brittle and crack right off in shear (and sometimes in tension). Nails are great at shear and are made out of alloys that rarely crack, but can pull right out. Boat nails, ring nails, other stuff is out there, but this seems to be a pretty big advance in balancing the shear and tension capabilities, ease of installation, etc.
For absolute optimal strength, pre-drilled carefully sized screws work pretty well. This nail should be about as strong, but about 10% the effort to install, and probably a tenth the cost for the fastener.
There was a time that it was safe to assume that people at least had built a treehouse or some such and had a clue about basic woodworking techniques. Apparently that time is now past.
Roof trusses are usually held together with mending plates or nailing plates: A rectangular piece of metal as large as the timber allows, either with holes to drive a nail through or attached prongs which are nailed directly on either side of two pieces of a truss. And when you want a truss securely fastened to the top of a wall, you use an angled piece of metal, frequently called a 'hurricane tie'. It spreads the load out over a larger section of a wall and makes it less likely to fail under high winds.
Lose: misplace or fail || Loose: not bound together
According to TFA the cost of nails in a new house is $50-$60. The additional cost if you decide to use HurriQuake, is $15. You can argue all you want, but with a minimum wage salary of $5.15 pr hour, which should cost you as a consumer at least $10 pr hour, I think I would prefer Joe to use HurryQuake, rather than screws. Using screws for an entire house is going to take a lot more time than just one hour. And Joe probably isn't working for minimum wage either.
Oh, and apart from the cost of labour (and the land lot), a house isn't that expensive. The wood and stones you need can mostly be found for free somewhere out in nature. From these you can manufacture things like cement, bricks, stone wool, wood studs, planks, etc... The great thing about the industrialized world, is that through new inventions we are able to reduce the amount of manual labour in getting things done. Time is money. Even if you worked your entire lifetime, you probably wouldn't be able to build a modern house from stuff you found in the nature. Yet, most people can afford one easily.
Wood is a great building material, or a poor one. As someone else pointed out, it satisfies many demands simultaneously. Market forces (cost and home type), environment (earthquakes, severe weather and other factors not existing in the UK, for example) and personal taste (ease of retrofit, etc.) all contribute to building material choice.
One of the factors that's interesting is that the quality of wood used in construction differs quite a lot from the long-lasting timbers in the old wood-frame houses. I owned an over-hundred-year-old house which had lasted through two of our age's most severe earthquakes, with aplomb. In a termite-endemic area the naturally pest-resistant, tight-grained old-growth redwood timbers and planking (it had solid heartwood plank sheathing, not OSB or plywood) had no damage (the "modern" addition, built with current farmed-fir 2x4s, was not so fortunate). I have no doubt that, properly maintained, the house will last another hundred years or more (possibly with more than one generation of modern-construction additions).
But that wood construction is not typical of current practice. By today's standards (it was built to no code but the good judgment of the original builder) it would be horribly material-hungry and overengineered. The pace of building in the U.S. demands cheaper materials and techniques--in fact, to do otherwise would be a criminal waste of limited natural resources; as to why low-quality timber is being used instead of more poured concrete--I bet it has much to do with consumer demand and tradition (that is, what contractors are used to working with and homeowners are used to buying) and little to do with actual economics.
demi