Scientists have found a way to harden wood to make a knife that rivals steel
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.
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.
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.
"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.
> WATCH A wooden nail is hammered through three boards.
Having just spent the morning driving nails with a 10-year-old, it pained me to watch this adult use a hammer.
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?
Fun days for airport security :)
How do they handle people bringing caramic knifes today? Would wooden knives display clearly on their scanners?
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.
discussion from 3 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28945312
If I've learned anything from infomercials, the demo video shouldn't be steak, but a mushy tomato.
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.
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).
I would love to know what percentage of this material by mass is petrochemical-based resins.
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.
The NileRed YouTube channel goes into the lignin removal chemistry here https://youtu.be/x1H-323d838
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.
this reminds me of "圧倒的不審者の極み!" or "kiwami japan" youtube channel. I also wonder if this channel was the inspiration for "howtobasic"
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)
what's with the videos? baby hits on the wooden "nails" ? the steak knife is pulling apart the meat and not cutting it ?
This reminds me of the bloodwood from the Malazan Book of the Fallen[1], which is arguably the greatest Canadian fantasy epic.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malazan_Book_of_the_Fallen
Previously description of “super-wood”. (Also university of Maryland) https://umdrightnow.umd.edu/umd-researchers-create-super-woo...
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...
This sounds straight out of a solarpunk scifi story. Beautiful.
I'm curious about its application to light airplanes.
The article also says it won't rust like iron, but didn't say it wouldn't rot!
The bit about metal nails rusting… wood can also rot? Unless this process “pressure treats” the hardened wood nail and solves for this.
Disrupting the metal detector industry?
the careful tippy-tipping of the nail is comical XD
compare that to a roofer https://youtu.be/19RGYncQzlo
The nature of attention and publicity is sad. Of all the things you could do with very hard wood, we lead with knives because knives can threaten us, and therefore attention.
Dope.