Model Airplanes

Long before Elon Musk, there was Henry Ford. Never satisfied to revolutionize just one industry, he typically worked on several at once. Over the course of his career, beside mass-producing Model Ts, Ford dabbled in shipbuilding, home construction, rubber planting in Brazil, radio broadcasting, soybean farming, and, for a brief period in the 1920s and early 1930s, aviation.

In 1925, Ford introduced the all-metal Tri-Motor, which he then used to run a scheduled passenger service from Detroit to Chicago. A year later, on his 63rd birthday, Henry unveiled an even more ambitious project: the Ford “Flivver,” a flying car for the masses that was supposed to do for airplanes what the Model T had done for autos. Within two years, though, his dream of affordable aviation had ended, due to the fatal crash—on February 25, 1928—of the Flivver and its only test pilot, 25-year-old Harry J. Brooks.

Herman Moekle, a Ford company accountant, recalled years later in an oral history interview: “I always had the idea that Mr. Ford felt very badly about [Brooks’ death], and that was the thing that clinched his getting out of the airplane business. Mr. Ford didn’t want to develop anything that could so readily be the cause of a loss of life.”

Brooks had met Henry Ford through another one of the tycoon’s many interests—old-time American music. Brooks’ father Joseph played fiddle in a dance band, and mentioned to Ford his son’s passion for aviation. “Ford was interested and told the father to send his

Article source: https://www.airspacemag.com/daily-planet/crash-doomed-henry-fords-flying-car-180968316/

“Our results reveal that rigid and incompressible balsa can be made highly compressible by a chemical treatment and carbonization process, yielding a wood carbon sponge with mechanical compressibility and fatigue resistance and electrical response sensitivity surpassing those of most reported compressible carbonaceous materials,” says co-senior author Liangbing Hu, a nano-engineer and materials scientist at the University of Maryland, College Park (UMD)’s A. James Clark School of Engineering. “Since this wood carbon sponge is fabricated completely from natural wood with a simple and cost-effective method, the source material is also exceptionally renewable and sustainable, as opposed to popular options like carbon nanotubes or graphene.”

The authors achieved the bendable yet resilient architecture of the wood carbon sponge by using common chemicals to destroy the stiff hemicellulose and lignin fibers that maintain the normal cell-wall structure of the balsa wood and then heating the treated wood to 1,000?C in order to turn the organic material into carbon alone. The net effect of the process was to collapse the repeated, regular, rectangular pockets typical of the microstructure of balsa and other woods and replace them with a stack of wavy, interlocking, arch-like carbon sheets, likened by Hu to a cross between a coiled spring and a honeycomb.

Whereas normal carbonized wood, obtained from only the heating step without any chemical modifications, is so fragile that any reasonable applied force pulverizes it irreversibly into ash and dust, the wood carbon sponge withstood and rebounded from substantial compression for up to 10,000 consecutive trials before deformation set

Article source: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180301125108.htm

HARWICH – What do a handful of robots, a 3D printer, and the Harwich Cultural Center have in common? They’re all integral to the Cape Cod Makers organization, since members can now utilize a 3D printer to build robots and other cool creations in their new Cultural Center space.

What are the Cape Cod Makers? In layman’s terms, it’s a group of people who get together to, well, make stuff. Of course, it’s way more technical than that. According to Jim Sullivan, president of the group’s board of directors, the Cape Cod Makers is a non-profit organization created roughly five years ago to support the growing maker movement on Cape Cod.

Makers are yesterday’s tinkerers, but with better equipment, often in the form of robotics kits, lathes, all manner of tools, and the aforementioned printer. While robot building is a popular pastime of many makers, who often create them for competitions, makers lend their skills to myriad projects of the do-it-yourself nature.

Sullivan said the local group was inspired by Artisan’s Asylum, a massive community workshop in Somerville.

“It’s this huge maker space,” Sullivan said. “It has 3D printers, welding, wood shops, all kinds of stuff.”

Sullivan and his fellow makers felt the Cape should have something similar.

“That started us on this journey,” Sullivan said. “For us, it’s about trying to get as many different types of makers together.”

As the group searched for a space that would work well for its various members, they held meetups wherever they could, anywhere from Falmouth to Dennis and

Article source: http://www.capecodchronicle.com/en/5309/features/2714/Cultural-Center-Space-Gives-Cape-Cod-Makers-Room-To-Get-Creative-Harwich-People-Harwich-Center.htm