April 8, 2008: Recycle

[xoxoxoBruce]

This may be a bit extreme, but what the hell. I always like free materials for a project I'm doing.
If I remember correctly, chopsticks are usually made of Birch.
From

A former city employee in the Fukushima prefecture town of Koriyama has built a 4-meter (13-ft) long canoe from thousands of used disposable chopsticks recovered from the city hall cafeteria. Bothered that perfectly good wood was going to waste after a single use, Shuhei Ogawara — whose job at city hall involved working with the local forestry industry — spent the last two years of his career collecting used chopsticks from the cafeteria. An experienced canoe builder, Ogawara spent over 3 months gluing 7,382 chopsticks together into strips to form the canoe shell, to which he added a polyester resin coat. The canoe weighs about 30 kilograms (66 lbs), which is a bit heavier than an ordinary cedar canoe, but Ogawara is confident it will float. A launching ceremony is planned for May at nearby Lake Inawashiro.

[JuancoRocks]

I imagine it will do well in choppy water.

[SPUCK]

Or in a stick e situation.

[glatt]

Very interesting. I wonder how he worked with such short strips.

Normally, long strips are attached to temporary forms that are a foot or so apart. With such short strips, you'd need many more forms spaced more closely together. Or else scarf all those chopsticks together to make long strips. But then you have lots of waste.

Hmm.

[LabRat]

That is cool.

Now, lemme see it done with toothpicks. . .and I'll REALLY be impressed.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Originally Posted by glatt

Normally, long strips are attached to temporary forms that are a foot or so apart. With such short strips, you'd need many more forms spaced more closely together. Or else scarf all those chopsticks together to make long strips. But then you have lots of waste.

...Ogawara spent over 3 months gluing 7,382 chopsticks together into strips to form the canoe shell,...

It sounds like he made long strips first?

[BigV]

For such short "strips", it's conceivable that he didn't use cross sectional forms perpendicular to a strongback (classic strip building style) at all. Perhaps he used a full surface form, like a balloon or a foam model, like making a paper machie globe for the science fair...

As an experienced canoe builder, I would think that the square edged wedge shaped "strips" would be very easy to scarf together. Even if they didn't make strips with flat edges, they could still puzzle piece together if they were scarfed together in a regular pattern, making a strip to strip seam like a masonry running bond.

In fact, I imagine the "strips" would be more than one chopstick wide. When complete each one would look like a long piece of wooden low-angle rickrack.

[kerosene]

The pattern of the chopsticks makes the boat look really nice.

[Shawnee123]

I like the ones stained with soy sauce.

[glatt]

Originally Posted by BigV

Perhaps he used a full surface form, like a ... foam model

I was thinking the same thing. But there are lots of details that I'd like to know. Like if he used a foam mold, how would he clamp the chopsticks in place? Typically, foam molds are used with vacuum bagging and fiberglass only.

Anyway, it's cool.

[BigV]

There are a couple of ways I can imagine for that task. Toenail/brad the strips to each other like hardwood flooring. They'd stick to each other but pull out of the foam. But then you'd have a canoe interior full of brad points. Uncomfortable. Or... staples. That's what I used. A million staples. That's a million going in and a million to pull out. Or hotglue on the formside (pehaps covered in some mold release/plastic sheeting). The hotglue could easily be rubbed off the inside of the canoe once it was cooled and the form removed.

I just can't see forms three inches apart for the length of the boat. What a pain.

[glatt]

I can't think of any kind of mechanical fasteners that would hold chopsticks to the foam. Plus, making the foam plug in the first place would be a lot of extra work. Kind of like building a boat so you can build a boat.

I also agree having a few score forms would be a huge pain.

I think the only way it would work is if the chopsticks are glued together into strips first, and then the boat is built with conventional building techniques.

[monster]

How environmentally friendly is it to use all that glue, though?

[glatt]

Depends on how much use the boat gets and if he was going to buy a plastic boat instead.

But yeah, there is an environmental cost associated with the glue.

[BigV]

fyi glatt:

I am a quarter of the way through retyping the text of my own stripping experience. I started before this thread but it seems appropriate to tell you here that I haven't forgotten your request for my story.

I'm working on it.