New world of words

Last night I was very stupid. I got inspired to write. So I wrote, and it was 1am before I shutdown the old (new) laptop and lay down my weary head.

But the true moment of enlightenment came just now whilst reading the Australian Standards Online (No, I'm not a completely sad bastard - I was doing it for my honours), anyway, I came across the word "frangible". Cool word, I thought. It turns out that it is from the old French, and means breakable, or fragile.

It's kind of interesting the thought of designing stuff that has to be easily broken. Like those "Break glass in case of fire" panels.

I spent the summer designing stuff so that it would break really easily. Not many people aim at low breaking points, so it makes the task that much more difficult.

I remember trying to perform a destructive test where failure should have occurred when I applied 30kg. I gave up at 150kg. It was kind of funny - it was all held up by al foil (120 micron, rather than your usual 10-20 micron stuff). The pics tell the story I think... In each of those little boxes were 10kg of ball bearings. The big buckets were full of water - 20kg each. All held up by bending around some al foil...

Anyway, the stuff, quite simply, was not frangible enough.