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Worlds first wooden supercar.
(75 posts, started )
Quote from tristancliffe :Anyway, the thing is, wood isn't such a bad material, and is perfectly acceptable for making boats, cars, engines, houses, desks, pencils etc.

I see your point, but as far as I'm concerned every one of those things could be improved if made not out wood, but Carbon Fiber, Metal, Plastic, bricks and materials like that...

maybe I have to think outside the box, but somehow in the past I have used wooden pencils, now I use a plastic pen style pencil, in the past all the houses were wooden, but I didn't see a wooden skyscraper yet... and so on...the only upside of wooden stuff I can imagine right now is the looks of the faces of the environmentalists
Surely environmentalists can't be pro-wooden cars? Seriously.

There were just over 32 million cars in the UK in 2002. Even if each one is a single tree, to replace them all with wood is not only retarded but probably more environmentally disastrous as the same thing out of steel or carbon fibre. I'm talking oxygen and landslides here.

I know they'll be light so probably use less fuel to travel equal distances, but I'm slightly more worried about being able to breathe than running out of fossil fuels
Quote from Dajmin :
There were just over 32 million cars in the UK in 2002. Even if each one is a single tree, to replace them all with wood is not only retarded but probably more environmentally disastrous as the same thing out of steel or carbon fibre. I'm talking oxygen and landslides here.

On the other hand, if they would see a city full of wooden cars they would definetly look at normal cars (like Hummer H1, Viper, Zonda and such) as a perfect example of environmentaly friendly vehicles
On the other hand, wood has a very low embodied energy rating (energy required over the whole process of extraction, manufacturing and deconstruction/disassembly), it's definitely much lower than steel (edit: 24x lower, 126x lower than aluminium) so in those terms its a good choice. Harvested from sustainably managed plantations, wood's about as green as you get. Wood's a renewable resource, and when finished can easily become something else. In reverse, you can probably source your material from old newspapers, telephone books, coffee tables etc, so it doesn't really seem that too far-fected an idea.
In theory yes.
But I doubt if wood was the material used in car manufacturing that it would be sustainable at all. Hell, the only reason paper can be
Even the fastest-growing trees take a several years to reach a harvestable stage.
I see trees as being more sustainable in the long term. If we slaughter all these cows once and for all, and use all the fields to plant trees, we'd have plenty to start building a notable percentage of our cars from wood. Also if we became much less of a consumer society as a whole and looked after stuff so it lasted, that would sure help things too.
at the very least wood should solve a bunch of waste problems
pushing a car through a wood chipper to turn it into fertilizer must be a hell of a lot easier than recycing one made of several kind of alloys welded and sandwiched together
Quote from Stang70Fastback :All I have to say is, CONCEPTUALLY, I just don't see a "wooden" car having the same energy-absorbing, impact-withstanding, life-saving capacity as today's modern vehicles. At least not without complicated manufacturing processes to produce ribbed, laminated, and other modified wooden parts.

Ribbing and laminating wood isn't difficult or expensive, certainly nothing more costly than the process that are used to get metal ore into sheet steel.

Quote from anik360 :If I am right on this Doesn't each and every piece of wood have different densities and masses, if so then how can those idots have made a super car, that would have the worst weight distribution partly because there is no equal distribution on it anyway.

That shouldn't be an issue, certainly didn't seem to be a major issue with wooden framed cars of old or the worlds finest boats.

Quote from Chrisuu01 :Somehwo at some point i se big accident with this car with the driver inside beighn dead and,

full of woodsplinters(ouch@!!)[shouts dam You Al Gore]

Becaus i dont realy trust wood for beighn safe

The only safety issue with wood really would be splinters, one of the luckiest escapes I've seen in racing was someone who ended up unconscious with a splinter dug in the foam under the back of his helmet, that being said it was the same wooden frame that took the energy out of a huge rear end shunt that could easily have killed him had that energy not be absorbed. Having said that though sharp metal edges aren't a lot nicer and carbon fibre splinters are a lot worse.
Quote from ajp71 :Ribbing and laminating wood isn't difficult or expensive, certainly nothing more costly than the process that are used to get metal ore into sheet steel.

Yeah - but I still think it's easier to produce a block of styrofoam than laminated wood...
Quote from Bob Smith :If we slaughter all these cows once and for all, and use all the fields to plant trees



can't stop laughing at the idea...thank you, made my day
Quote from Stang70Fastback :Yeah - but I still think it's easier to produce a block of styrofoam than laminated wood...

How many polystyrene cars do you see? It's only used in cars as deformable padding, which could easily be done by a chip board type of material. Polystyrene can't be economically recycled, takes ages to decompose and poses a serious hazard in a fire. I'm not saying that every part of the car need be made of wood anyway, in exactly the same way that cars are not just built out of metal.
The foam could still be there, and the pressed, welded, plated steel 'frame' could be replaced with wood.
In that case, let's all start designing and building our own brand of commercially viable wooden cars. We must have enough people here who know about each stage. Let's get it done and get a couple of Nobel prizes going on
I've said it at least twice before - it ain't gonna happen commercially. Not because it's impossible, but because it'd cost too much to get anywhere near commerically viable except on the very small scale. Like a one off supercar where costs don't matter.
It would last about 2 days before someone set it on fire if anyone tried owning it round here
It's not as though non-wooden cars are particular fire resistant though, so not really a fair argument.

The wooden one might float though, which could be useful for coastal town pensioners.
The wood would be taken as an invitation for arson though, whereas they'd ignore a normal car :P
so if you go camping and need wood for campfire on a really cold night...
Roll up, roll up, get your very own wooden car here, with authentic classic-style plastic dashboard...
Quote from Bob Smith :Roll up, roll up, get your very own wooden car here, with authentic classic-style plastic dashboard...

And leather seats. I don't think anyone would drive a car capable of over 200mph sitting in wooden seats.
I also don't see a wooden bumper being able to flex as much as a plastic one and then pop back and maintain its shape. I think dents and stuff would be a bigger issue with wood as well.
Quote from Crashgate3 :It would last about 2 days before someone set it on fire if anyone tried owning it round here

your location must be wrong then... should be paris
Quote from Stang70Fastback :I also don't see a wooden bumper being able to flex as much as a plastic one and then pop back and maintain its shape. I think dents and stuff would be a bigger issue with wood as well.

You can get flexible wooden boards. The point is not that you'd choose to make every component out of wood though. Metal bumpers are no longer used for the reasons you've just mentioned and you wouldn't use carbon fibre for the same reasons. There's no one material that will be right for every job but there's no reason why wood can't be a very good structural material in a car chassis either as a potential composite replacement or as a material that's less expensive and easier to work with and repair than composites in small production runs (eg. single seaters).
I wonder if it comes varnished or if you can pick your own varnish to match your nice wooden garage doors and such.
Quote from Michael Denham :I wonder if it comes varnished or if you can pick your own varnish to match your nice wooden garage doors and such.

Thats more than likely the option instead of paint colour. Wood stain FTW.

Worlds first wooden supercar.
(75 posts, started )
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