Next message: Lew Hodgett: "Re: lv-ab: Argument for substituting wheat flour for wood flour"
"We eat when we're not hungry, drink when we're not thirsty. We buy what we
don't need and throw away everything that's useful."
-- Harrison Ford's character in the film _Mosquito Coast_
Besides being insufferably cheap and lazy, I get real pleasure from making
things that I need out of perfectly good salvage. I can't begin to count the
things that I've cannibalized from something else. Sometimes they end up
looking like Frankenstein's experiment gone terribly wrong, but they work
well enough.
Now I've grown tired of buying epoxy thickeners, paying for something that
has a cost mark-up of something like 5,000% at West Marine. Yes, marine
fillers and thixotropics are formulated for maximum strength and
convenience, but in the bulk of applications, wood flour is fine, and
sometimes anything stronger is merely over-engineering.
I've never looked for wood flour in the stores. I tried using router dust,
but it was too coarse and granular. So what about Wheat flour? Wood flour is
almost pure cellulose, and cellulose is merely extra long chain starch
molecules. Wheat flour is merely shorter chains of starch. It's the same
composition. I have some stale wheat flour in the cupboard. Using it would
save me the time and money of trying to find and then paying for, wood
flour. If no one has any objections, I'm going to try it on the chine
fillets and sheer clamps on these pirogue/kayaks. If I succeed, who knows? I
could build an entire boat out of stale food.
Jeff
"Weizenboot"
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