Thu Oct 01, 2020 7:57 am by femurat
Here's the story, edocdab.
Many years ago an engineer that was a family friend had an idea. He thought that resin could be made stronger by an internal fiber reinforcement, like reinforced concrete. Me and my dad tried to help him demonstrate the concept. I was just a kid and was just looking. The experiment consisted in creating similar resin dowels, with and without the reinforcement that looked like fiberglass to me. Then we had to break them and see which one was stronger. We were breaking them under a small press, held by a couple padlocks. It was very difficult to measure the dowels resistance, mainly because of our limited equipment. So the experiment failed.
I was so surprised to find this old padlock, slightly deformed by the press, without a key and probably broken, but decided to add it to the collection anyway. Yesterday I found out it still works!
Cheers