Bread knife

[pommy]

Greetings all!

First post on this section.

As a Science teacher, most of my students assume plastic is a soft material. In fact it is not.

If you try to cut woven plastic, woven rope or cord caught round your prop with a straight edged knife you will be there for a very long time and will end up with a blunt knife.

A serrated edged bread knife will cut through the plastic in seconds.

Hope I'm not teaching Grandmas to suck eggs.

Regards, Rob.
Ballina

[TheRealAndy]

plastic is a fairly broad term. It would be interesting to read into the history of the term plastic, because when I did engineering at uni plastic referred to the state of a material, ie as in plastic deformation etc.

I think the more technical correct term to teach is polymer, but once again that is a fairly broad term. You could talk about plastics as in thermoset plastics such as polyeurethane (fibreglass boats) or thermoplastics such as polestyrene (white packing foam) or polyethene (garden irrigation pipe). The former typically being very hard (low ductile) and the latter being quite soft (high ductile).

[liltuffy]

Hey Rob, get out and use that rod I sold you - you have too much time on your hands.

Craig