Cutting cooked meat seems like about the worst possible demonstration they could have come up with because we already have disposable wood cutlery able to easily cut meat that you can readily buy by the hundreds at Target/Walmart/Amazon. The standard food demonstration for sharpness is slicing ripe tomatoes, and demonstrating toughness needs an uncooked winter squash.
> "Surprisingly, our wooden knife is actually three times sharper than the typical stainless steel dinner table knife,"
The typical stainless steel dinner table knife is slightly serrated, which means it doesn't need to be sharp to work well. Being sharper than something that doesn't need to be sharp to function properly is a very dumb comparison.
Sharpness also has no relation to durability except possibly in the inverse. A typical steel dinner table knife will keep doing its job for decades and thousands of wash cycles without any maintenance. Meanwhile there's a great youtube channel where a guy makes razor sharp chef's knives out of random fragile materials like jello.
This article was frustrating because it seemed to not understand the value of why we use what materials we do.
I could make a knife from wood now and it would be sharp enough to cut steak. It, just like cheaper steel knives, wouldn't remain sharp as long as it's higher value counterparts.
They mention wooden nails but don't mention if they'll fill an important role nails do -- their success isn't only that they're hard enough to nail through wood, but that they can bend. Houses move. The nails have to have that bit of movement too.
Yes yes, you've made wood roughly as hard as steel, but steel has more than hardness going for it.
Nails don't need to be that hard. They're typically made from thin mild steel. If it's hard enough to be used as cutlery, demo it like every knife gets demoed. Slice up some tomatoes, chop roots, and see how it holds and edge. If it can still cut 2m slices, it's functional kitchen knife.
You can cut a steak with the disposable softwood knives we already have.
Kind of. It took nearly two minutes to drive that skinny main though three skinny boards. A metal brad of the same size would go through that would in 3, maybe 4 whacks.
The way they were hitting it looked either like they had never hammered before, or that they were afraid of shattering the nail.
Yeah, honestly, I was super interested when I saw the title and read the article, but when I saw both of the videos (the steak cutting one and the nail one), I thought "Are they trying to use these demos to convince people of the inferiority of the wooden products?"
In the steak cutting one, the way one little edge piece is cut off looks like a plastic butterknife could have done just as well. Your description of the nail driving one was spot on - that video was downright embarrassing.
I thought you were being mean or exaggerating or something, because after eight or so whacks I thought they had driven it through. Nope. Very delicately handled.
If somebody never watched it, I recommend starting with the older videos, though. There isn't any dependency on the chronological order per se, but once finished with "just" making knifes from all kinds of stuff the guy gets way more esoteric over time, and some stuff he does admittedly gets rather hard to follow, since it has little to no commentary. Like instead of just using kitchen salt he'll extract it from sea water first or do something even more obscure.
When I was a kid I used to launch Estes rockets. They came with mostly balsa wood fins that would frequently break on landing. The balsa wood also absorbed paint unless you hit it with a clear coat first. This for some reason gave me the idea of rubbing Elmer's glue on to it, letting it dry, then sanding it and then painting it. Not only did it paint easily but I never lost a single fin again. The closest I came to that was when a fin ripped itself off the cardboard tube of the rocket rather than break.
I love tips like this. It's one reason why I watch those TV shows like "Detroit Muscle". They're full of things like that that make working on cars so much easier and more effective.
For example, the usual method for replacing the gasket in an automatic transmission, which is on the bottom of the car, is to remove the transmission. This is because it is impossible to hold all the balls and springs in place to put the cover on while it is upside down. The trick shown is to use a bit of vaseline to "glue" the parts in place. The vaseline will dissolve in the trans fluid and won't affect it. Voila! You save a lot of time.
I remember reading something similar for the pins in an MG (or Triumph? not sure anymore) manual transmission. In this case the suggestion was to use peanut butter to hold the pins in.
One trick I discovered myself. When working on the car, your hands get very greasy dirty. It's impossible to wash it all off, it just has to wear off after a couple days.
The trick is to rub your hands with Vaseline Lotion beforehand. Then the car dirt will wash right off.
Also be sure to rub your hands down with abrasive soap (like gojo) prior to rinsing with water. The water makes it harder to remove the grease so you want the grease in the soap and off of your hands first.
Thanks for this tip! My daughter recently got into model rockets and it seemed to me that untreated balsa wood was unlikely to last more than a few launches.
> gave me the idea of rubbing Elmer's glue on to it
Not to diminish your inventive skills but I'm pretty sure this was known back in the mid 80's when I was doing rockets as a kid. Googling it shows it to be a pretty common technique going back to at least the early 2000's.
1970s in my case and I told people about it and they did it too. What's new here is I didn't know anyone else actually listened or came up with it on their own.
Lovely idea. I would like to see a comparison of the energy requirement for hardening wood this way vs. making steel. Would give a better sense of whether this is a technology worth pursuing as one path toward decarbonising the future.
I'd like to see specific comparisons in physical properties versus steel and specifically which steel they are comparing to. Including in physical dimensions since their nail seems fairly thick. Steel is, as I understand it, hundreds of different variants each with their own physical properties.
For example, they say 23 times harder in the article than regular wood. Wood has a Brinell scale of up to 7 although most is less. Times 23 that comes out to 161. Mild steel is 120. However hardened tool steel is 900.
I had some questions about that too. It looks cool, to be sure, but I watched the video of the nail being hammered through some boards, and... let's just say I'm not so timid with steel nails!
For what they were showing, if you were going for "equivalent to steel", I'd expect to see a tap to secure the nail and then probably only two strokes to sink it. They tap it a hundred times, which begs the question of what would happen if you actually hit it.
It's safe to assume that they're comparing to mild steel, which nails and table knives are made from. That said, I'm amused by the thought of a hardened tool steel nail... make sure you wear safety glasses and gloves, because when that shatters, the shards will be sharp and speedy. Here's hoping it's the nail, and not your hammer.
If this is the same bit that's hit this page just recently, the chemicals used were sodium hydroxide and sodium sulfite (to remove the lignin) and then food grade oil to seal it.
To dissolve lignin? I haven’t read the paper yet but doubt it’s anything terrible or too exotic. Probably a recipe based around sodium hydroxide (NaOH).
Even if it were to take more energy it might still be a win since it would effectively lock up the carbon in a (basically) non-decomposing form. You’d have to look at the net emissions taking into account the amount of carbon dioxide that would have been released as that piece of wood decomposed (or you can look at it from the perspective of the CO2 removed from the atmosphere by that wood).
From an emissions perspective, the problem with plastics is that they lock up a tiny portion of the CO2 that was previously locked up as petroleum (the remainder is released into the atmosphere as byproduct).
If we had “mined” plastic directly out of the ground, it would be fine to use (again from an emissions perspective), though not a net win since it would have already been “locked up” whereas wood only temporarily locks up hydrocarbons until it is cut down, used, and then ultimately decomposed. This would break that cycle.
From a non-emissions perspective, wood doesn’t have the same “microplastics” problem (although who knows what this bastardized wood might end up having).
Sure, everything you are saying is correct, but you two are basically concerned about different problems, and, FWIW, I'm honestly more concerned about your "opponent"'s one. All this CO₂ emission stuff got way more political lately than it perhaps should be, so I can easily imagine selling stuff made out of bastardized wood as "eco-friendly" to the concerned customers, while in reality, production and everything else accounted for it will be more net-harmful for the ecology than the "traditional" (plastic or otherwise) alternative. And (risking to start another flamewar here) even that being put aside, I'm not even sure we should be as much concerned about CO₂ emissions as we currently are...
In the meanwhile, we somehow stop focusing on the whole bunch of other problems, that definitely aren't gonna solve themselves as well. Like, the fact that the oceans are turning into a huge dumpster for plastics that aren't going to magically dissolve in the next couple of hundreds of years. Or like we are only concerned about burning oil not being "green energy", and somehow skip over the fact, that we are literally burning millions of tons of substance each day, that we cannot produce and that doesn't renew itself (practically speaking), while being the ONLY substance suitable for making thousands of materials that we use to build basically everything for the last 50 of years (and it doesn't seem like we are going to find a better alternative soon).
"We use chemicals to partially remove lignin. And after the first step the wood becomes soft, flexible and somewhat squishy"
"The compressed material showed very little tendency to bounce back to its original thickness."
I love the soft and squishy part, wondering whether it could be pressed into a form to make a bicycle frame to get away from the complicated process of laying carbon layers or the heavy weight of steel.
But yeah, replacing plastic throw away utensils should be a priority for a material like that.
> "So the second step is that we apply pressure. We also increase the temperature. The purpose of that is to really densify the natural wood and also remove the water, reducing its thickness to around 20 per cent of the original natural wood."
Very interesting. One question I'd have is what happens when the hardened wood is exposed to moisture over a long period of time? Humid climates? Does it reabsorb water which would take away from the hardness? The article did mention it could "survive a dishwasher" but doesn't clarify what that actually means. What happens over time when you use it as a nail if the wood you're nailing it into is moist?
> three times sharper than the typical stainless steel dinner table knife
The video shows pretty mediocre cutting, but perhaps that's on par with a "typical table knife". There's a good reason restaurants will give you a steak knife, alongside a table knife, for red meat.
This is awesome especially since I make wooden knives! Specifically out of sugar maple, since they’re nice and hard. I make them to look like steak knives as a joke, but they work great on cheese, butter, and steamed vegetables.
If you ever want to get into woodworking you can pick up a bandsaw for a couple hundred bucks and they’re a great first project.
Nowadays they look most like the ones on the right but are better refined and are serrated. The two left are pine (smells great but are soft), and the two right are maple.
I've seen this pop up on HN before. And I just read another article on HN about how Bamboo lumber is made and found an interesting intersection. In that article, during the first few months of their growth, Bamboo gets to their final height, then they start to, as the article says, "lignify" for several years. Would that mean that Bamboo has much less lignin in the beginning, and would that also make young Bamboo shoots a possible way to get cellulose without as much chemicals?
> "Surprisingly, our wooden knife is actually three times sharper than the typical stainless steel dinner table knife," he said. "It can achieve its purpose of cutting medium well-done steak very nicely without breaking."
Cool stuff, but that's not very sharp. Still a long way to go?
Getting knives past airport security seems not particularly difficult from the experience of my circle and other anecdotal sources. I've had friends and family accidentally get knives through security on many occasions, and I have also accidentally done it myself. To my knowledge none of them has ever been caught in the converse situation and had to give up a knife.
I imagine if one were resourceful and deliberate about it, it would be even more successful.
They search people randomly anyway, and they search people if the human operator thinks they see something suspicious. If we can keep the number of searches constant and just increase the probability of finding a knife, it's a win for everyone.
It's obviously not a win if there's too many false positives, but it's worth a try.
If we have X cases where people brought knives onto planes, and no notable incidents of knife-enabled violence in the past few years, what's the motivation for reducing X by half?
I'm sure that some would-be-criminals are dissuaded by the TSA, but that seems to already be working today. It seems like a very reasonable outcome would be no decrease in airline violence/crime, but an increase in taking people's property.
All said, if there is still a scourge of knife-wielding criminals on airlines, I'd be happy to be wrong here. Otherwise, though, this seems like it have a very marginally negative impact on the average passenger by taking away their belongings that they accidentally packed.
Great point! Although I'd think P(knife hijacking)*Cost(knife hijacking) would be much much larger than the cost of knives being confiscated, even if P(knife hijacking) is very small, just given how cheap knives are and how big that Cost is. I think the bigger point is how much the software would cost and whether the reduction in X justifies that expenditure. Also need to consider cost savings of being able to fire some TSA staff. That reduces the theatre aspect perhaps, but maybe not if it's done the right way (I can think of a few ideas)
Joe McRandom is heading through TSA, and is falsely flagged as having a knife by this software.
Because the computer _can't_ be wrong - a depressingly common view among anyone who doesn't work with computers regularly - the TSA agent flags our friend Joe. Joe's entire luggage is then unpacked, in front of everyone present - hope he didn't have anything sensitive in there!
When he inevitably does not have a knife in his luggage, the TSA agent spends way too much time searching for the secret compartment, as well as digging through all the stuff. When there is _still_ no knife to be found, Joe is taken into custody - we've already seen that airport security can be trusted to abuse their power - causing Joe to miss his flight, be psychologically damaged (I'd be pretty shook up after that degree of search and detainment), and possibly lose his luggage (better hope the TSA did a good job keeping track of it, and decides you deserver to have it)!
Is this situation likely, strictly speaking? Over the massive number of TSA agents working and travel being done, I would say yes. All of the negative effects of the TSA mentioned above already happen, a system like this just makes it more likely to be occur for no real reason.
Also, while the average knife may not be expensive, some are. On top of that, many who carry knives form emotional attachments to them, so even if there's no "real" damage being done, there is some amount of harm being done in a much harder to quantify way.
I was going to put a disclaimer because of the risk of sounding cliche/ironic/sarcastic, but figured it was a legitimately good idea so I decided to spare people.
Ceramic knives seem quite fragile in the kitchen, I am skeptical they have a lot of potential as weapons, as even small amounts of twisting/shearing force will crack or snap them.
> Getting knives past airport security seems not particularly difficult from the experience of my circle and other anecdotal sources. I've had friends and family accidentally get knives through security on many occasions, and I have also accidentally done it myself. To my knowledge none of them has ever been caught in the converse situation and had to give up a knife.
May I ask what your race, and the race of your circle, is?
I am white but with black (and now slightly grey) hair and a beard with tan-ish skin. More pertinent to your implication I assume is that my middle name is of Muslim descent and can pass for being of middle-eastern descent, and I seem to get stopped for "random" checks and patdowns more frequently than my white-bread looking friends and colleagues. Observation bias perhaps on my part, but also maybe not.
Generally, once you get through the metal detector, the knife that was accidentally smuggled through won't be found by a simple body search, if that's your inclination?
This happened to my friend (not White if that's so important to you) when an old pocket knife had gotten stuck beneath the bottom of her handbag. They kept running it through the detector, took everything out of it to check, couldn't find the source, and so eventually let her go.
There's a real need for security though, so while I would love to make it better (... by removing the theatre elements) that doesn't mean no security. We have lots of things that we know work but lack various wills to do so, ranging from the easy like "don't let anyone other than ticketed travellers anywhere near the terminal" to the crazy-sounding like "make flying 10x or 100x time more expensive".
Do we need this level of security at a bus station or a train station? No? Why?
Because planes can be flown into things? Lock the cabin door.
Because there's lots of people on planes? Well, there's lots of people on trains, buses, or in random offices and hotels. Why are the plane people special? What about giant conventions or events?
We have all this security because of 9/11, but only 1 security measure (locking cabin doors) was needed to stop the next 9/11.
I suspect this is overstated: preventing access to the cockpit from the passenger cabin solves a lot of the issues here: if a hijacker can’t use the plane as a cruise missile, the need for security is about equivalent to attacks on metros or passenger trains.
A scissor can't really compare to a proper forged and heat treated knife, and for the purpose of using a seemingly everyday object for a more malicious purpose there are better things imo.
They don't usually catch metal knives, much less ceramic ones.
I used to (post-9/11, pre-pandemic) frequently fly with bags that get used daily, and I often forgot about fairly large flip-blades rolling around in the bottom.
Several times, I had to surrender them to the TSA before a return flight, but usually I'd find them when I got back, and they never caught one on the first try IME.
So your odds of getting a big metal knife through are likely better than 50/50, and there didn't seem to be any penalty for getting caught. Why bother with fancy materials?
Haven’t they moved from Xray, which shows the difference between atoms thanks to wavelength, to ultrasounds, which show sharp edges and thus is suitable for anything iron, plastic or wood as long as it’s sharp?
I think it would be interesting to use the process for the extremely high tolerance-cut-metal blocks, where the items in the block are such tight tolerances that when inserted, you cant see them.
Then - cut all the items you want into the hunk/hunks of metal such that you can pop them out in-flight and assemble your mechanisms of chaos...
You can just have non-descript blocks in a case and say they are for scientific experiments but they look like un-machined pieces in the case. heck - even have a clear lid on the case with labels of different 'alloy make-ups' to make it look more like a metallurgical kit...
It may just be incidental or irrelevant, but I find the video of the steak cutting to be incredibly unconvincing. It looked like they just pushed apart a piece of well cooked meat like you could do with a spoon and slow cooked pork.
I'd like to see how this material behaves when formed into kitchen utensils like wooden spatulas and spoons rather than a knife. Would the density be more like metal (heavy)? Maybe it would scratch a nonstick surface like a metal utensil. But if I could have my wooden utensils in a form that wouldn't wear down or fall apart eventually from water and heat exposure, that would be great.
No, the density of cellulose is about the same as the density of other plastics, about 1-1.5 g/cc. For kitchen use, it does have the advantage over many other plastics that it's a thermoset; like teflon or phenolic, it won't melt, and unlike phenolic, it won't outgas toxic gases at ordinary temperatures (though who knows about the side products of the lignin-removal reaction). However, it is fairly hygroscopic, so it might not hold up as well as other plastics to water exposure, and especially to heat exposure while humid.
Didn't the kiwamijapan youtube guy figure out how to do this years ago? Really even then, it's not a new concept. Inmates in prisons turn toilet paper into daggers and I'm sure there are antiquities of sharp objects made from wood and other materials. I don't really understand the significance or newsworthiness of this.
That is a pretty cool result. The idea of a material with the hardness of steel but without the oxidizing issues is pretty appealing too.
The mentioned that it became "squishy" and then they pressed it to become its final shape. Building boats this way would be an interesting application.
And it would be interesting to understand its combustion properties. "Engineered wood" is all the rage in home building in North America because getting long structural timbers has become so expensive. If you add this to the set of techniques on engineered lumber, could you build better structural members with less material? Could you build those materials out of layered materials? (think oriented strand board (OSB) as 4 x 6 equivalent).
This looks like it can be accomplished with minimal basic chemistry and a hydraulic press. I'd love to see what type of acoustic guitars could be created using this material. Super thin tops and super rigid bodies are exciting.
There's also great progress in using nanocrystalline cellulose to produce super strong composite materials. Embedding graphene or carbon nanotubes gives you super light, super tough material that is suitable for replacing aluminum and steel structures.
I'd like to see that steak video with a serrated version of the knife.
Edit: I decided to do some research on if a serrated edge blade would in fact be better, leading me to a strange but interesting video of some Dutchmen unscientifically testing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAzrz0nC9-M (tl;dw, serrated seems it would be better for steak)
I had a good laugh from the nail video a few days ago. I imagined a house being built from these nails where all the carpenters spent 10 minutes hammering each individual nail into a couple of two by fours. I thinks is probably not as malleable as steel so it can shatter if hit too hard.
The video of them cutting the steak with the wooden knife shows extremely poor performance. The steak was torn apart more so than sliced. There is no way the knife in the video is “three times sharper” than a typical stainless steel kitchen knife as claimed.
I've noticed that steel in knives can easily be described as a waste. Cutting into food and opening packages doesn't generally need to require steel, for one.
There is always going to be the emergency/contingency psychology calling for quality steel in every knife to "save your life someday" but TBH it's a relief that customers themselves get to decide exactly what that could mean to them...otherwise the raging debate would probably mean even more prepper content invading innocent hobbyist videos.
I look forward to the coming cutting-materials range expansion. I would even look at a non-metal SAK for working people, if just as a recognition of human creativity...
I'm no fan of prepper content, but as an engineer, this criticism seems really weird and misguided to me. There's a reason we use steel in tools and knives. It's very difficult to find a material that can match the properties of steel. Having good edge-keeping while still maintaining toughness and avoiding brittle failure is REALLY hard.
This is conflating people who want or need to use steel with those who don't. Look at the JunkFoodTasterDotCom YouTube channel for example. He always cuts stuff. He uses a plastic knife. He's not an engineer.
That is more to my point: Steel isn't needed in a surprising number of knife use cases. I'm not surprised that an engineer wants to speak on behalf of steel and its properties. But that probably won't stop product designers from noticing a huge and tantalizing materials gap, around redefining what makes a knife useful to a consumer.
steel works well. its really cheap - both in economic and physical terms. it recycles perfectly, and if you do leave it in the ground on the water, its not going to harm anything. lasts a really long time, more with care.
seems like a really great design fit. Maybe there are better opportunities elsewhere?
Also I would argue that good design and modern quality stainless steel last forever in such things as cutlery. And forever here is decades. Probably centuries if stored even somewhat sensibly avoiding worst possible conditions. Not to forget how easy and resilient as material it is to clean.
I mean if you really want to defend steel, celebrate it, be my guest. But materials research and design for product development is a really cool area of focus and quite a different direction from what you are talking about. Especially in that we just don't know--it's not about the past, it's about the future. I hope to see it more with things like knives and tools.
Hm... I don't think you're reading closely. The point is not whether I already know (IOW the properties of my subjective past are not needed). The point is that there are definitely possible future outcomes that I do not know. Can you see why that might be helpful in thinking about the future of technology?
> IOW the properties of my subjective past are not needed
Your website in your profile already establishes that you're a professional bullshitter[1], so I don't think we need to dwell on that.
Even so, things of value can grow in manure. Do you actually have anything concrete to say or is it just handwaving all the way down? What's a superior alternative to steel for the general knife use cases? Maybe nanocarbon-quantumfiber?
From this passionate reply it sounds like your feelings have been hurt, 100%. But is it really fair to expect me to read a 20 page pdf on the strength of some rhetorical hand-wave? You could just say it: The unknown makes you uncomfortable. Do you think everything that was invented was just a cheap copy of what we had in the past? The logic here is underwhelming. The strange emotion is also unimpressive.
Anger and name calling, not returning to the topic as invited. Got it, you've written yourself a covert contract in which it's OK to be unfair, so I'm done here. And please stop letting PDFs do your thinking for you.
Its a shame it's not going to be any more real though.
Whilst interesting work if it can be applied elsewhere and with fast growing plants, but it's a bit hyped up based on current limited results.
Also, the process to make a steel knife isn’t really bad. If we were talking about how to make carbon fiber from wood, that would be cool, composites are really dirty to make and do not recycle.
So, cool, but the best use I’ve considered for a wood knife is getting through X-ray, but now you are back to composites being an option.
The market for green circumvention of security measures is probably very small.
It's likely to be very resistant to fungi, without all the convenient gaps and holes. Treating with borax or other antifungal chemicals would be easy, but that's a problem that would kill the structural part of a house whether or not the nails are wood.
> "Surprisingly, our wooden knife is actually three times sharper than the typical stainless steel dinner table knife,"
The typical stainless steel dinner table knife is slightly serrated, which means it doesn't need to be sharp to work well. Being sharper than something that doesn't need to be sharp to function properly is a very dumb comparison.
Sharpness also has no relation to durability except possibly in the inverse. A typical steel dinner table knife will keep doing its job for decades and thousands of wash cycles without any maintenance. Meanwhile there's a great youtube channel where a guy makes razor sharp chef's knives out of random fragile materials like jello.