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Aviation History
1918
1918 - 1494.PDF
"DECEMBER 26, 1918 AN APPARENT REVOLUTION IN FABRIC LOOMS By WITH perdurable peace at last within grasp and hold, qualitymust be, since sheer quantity need no longer be, the dominant factor of our aero-production. And with economy everbefore us, again must rule the commercial consideration of durability. As ever, we must leave no least detail of aero-material open to doubt; all must be of the soundest; but the wholesale scrapping of what merely suffers from a curabledefect, in view of the supreme emergency of the occasions of been no better than the interesting curiosities of pre-War aero-shows. No less in automobilism does the fabric of tyres, rather than the rubber, appear as the weak spot; so far merely" improved " by all sorts of skilful compromises rather than brought to the standard of strength of the rest. What have we then to choose from as to fibre ? Flax,cotton, ramie, sisal and nanduty. This last, though of wonderful promise, and growing as a weed over vast tracts of E H M H 0 a B H E 13 13 E 13 13 13 B m B E n m H 13 Fig. 1.—The new Trautvetter loom for auto-tyre and aero fabric claimed to weave diagonal threads in two directions as well as the ordinary warp and weft, in order to give equal strength in all directions with- out necessitating extra weight per square foot. 0 0 0 H 0 war, and indenting upon " Stores " for new at any cost, willhave to pass with the War. We shall then be on the surest ground, I submit, if in ourreforms of structure and material, we make the prime attack on the worst and most unsatisfactory features. Study them,find the remedy as we may, and apply it in each case, and then the minor defects will be found to harmonise, so to say, auto-matically into the general scheme of improvement. If not— well, in that case our proposition is different from any othermaterially constructive one yet experienced. On Defects : And The Choice of Material Now what is this worst feature in aero-construction ? Ap- parently the plane " fabric." For however much we may Argentina and Paraguay, has not yet been brought intocommercial production. Sisal has always been most hope- fully spoken of : but one notices that its supply appears tobe somewhat spasmodic. Again, practically there is no fibre grown—or that can be so cheaply grown—of such mar-vellous quality as ramie. But the provisos are first, that the pectines, or subtly adherent interstitial gums, shall be gotrid of without the hitherto inseparable use of alternate acid and alkaline baths and rettings, wholly destructive of thestrength of the fibre ; and secondly, that it shall be realised— as investors in ramie adventures and spinners do not, onefinds—that ramie fibre, unlike that of cotton, has no adherent " snake-mouth " at the ends ; nor, despite its wonderfulStaple length, has it the adhesive curl of wool. Here we are g. 2.—Enlarged view of the fabric showing .how the diagonal or bias threads run through the warp and weft. Fig. 3.—The warp, A, raised above the bias threads, CC. Fig. 4.—The warp, A, lowered w£ile the weft or lay, B, runs across over the bias threads, CC. import metal into the body-work and skeleton, it must beyears before we can surface with metal, even if we had an entirely suitable alloy ready to hand. For on this point,though much has been claimed that may be true, nothing is -established except the failures of past attempts ; that have approached merely to the weaving problem. So the pro-position, so far, practically narrows down to flax and cotton, with the latter very much in the commercial ascendant ; andfrom its greater cheapness and bulk of production, in much the greater prospective demand for aero fabric—provided 1463
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