So hard to know yet if it is an exaggeration or the truth but heard China will purchase from the United States, $100 Billion in Soybeans each year for the next two years. Thats a lot of traffic via West Coast ports.
I think it is more like 40 over the next several years.
That’s an awful lot of money for a hill of beans.[:-^]
But they’re MAGIC beans.
Henry Ford thought they were the wave of the future for automobile construction at one point…
Inventor of Kings FORD charcoal for grills which was a byproduct of burning wood scrapts from his cars. Still sold today in most stores.
-
Not invented by Henry Ford. His cousin’s husband, Edward Kingsford, found a good stand of lumber for Ford autos. The waste product was disposed of at the mill in a process to make pressed lumps developed by Orin Stafford. The plant for making them was designed by Edison and managed by Kingsford. The name “Kingsford” briquets came much later, in 1951, when the Ford division was sold off.
-
The body of the old East German (DDR) automobile, the Trabant (Trabi) was made rumored to be made from Duraplast, from soybeans, but likely there phenol-based material was derived from coal tar.
Seems like I recall that one of the states tried soybeans, or something similar, to make their licences plates. Didn’t last long once cows (and possibly other animals) discovered how tasty they were…
My newspaper uses soy ink for the printing.
Have you tried feeding your read newspaers to cows?[:)]
Henry Ford used soybeans to make experimental plastic bodies for cars. I’ve seen a picture of him smacking a car with an ax to show it’s strength. But, I did not see an “after” picture after the car got smacked. Early plastics were considered a luxury item and were mainly used for dashboard knobs and steering wheels. He did own woodlots in northern Michigan where the lumber from the trees were used to make model T body frames. Wooden planks used to make crates were recycled to make floor boards.
I am told that Trabant bodies were made of plaster and recycled plastic and whatever crap they could find that could be melted down and moulded. I’ve been to eastern Germany, most Trabbis are in the hands of collectors now.
I have. When the instrument was a hammer, there is no visible damage other than a little scuffing.
The ‘soybean car’ was a bit of a misnomer; I had thought any recognizable soy-plant part was heavily chemically modified to be used. In fact I thought I remembered the ‘plastic’ part was a hard urethane, like the early Endura bumpers, and would likely behave similar.
It turns out that the actual panels were a ‘phenolic resin’ (which means some flavor of Bakelite) with ‘soy plant fibers’ used as a kind of fibergrass in a composite. Apparently some part of this was aimed at preserving some kind of domestic auto production during potential wartime steel rationing, although the car was finished and introduced several months before Pearl Harbor. There are some interesting patents for lightweight car structure issued early in 1942. (There are a couple of interesting YouTube videos about different formulations and uses for “Bakelite” that are worth looking up, if your experience with the stuff is restricted as mine was to things like radio enclosures and Wen soldering-iron casings…)
Of course the development of composite car bodies (look up Weymann bodies, if you’re not familiar with them, to see what this entailed in a slightly earlier context, or doped aircraft fuselage construction) went in a different direction after WWII: to the Fiberglas in early show cars and the Corvette, and to the acrylic tried in a couple of GM cars of the mid-to-latter Fifties. At production scale, improvements in deep drawing and steel composition made that kind of construction less economical.
The Ford ‘plastic’ was described in contemporary textbooks as an example of one of the ugliest words in English:
Illlinois did that during one of the WW2 years in order to avoid using strategic materials. It was given up for the reasons mentioned.
And there’s the difference between Michigan and Illinois in a nutshell! [:D]
And here the Chicagoans were leading me to think all the cows were in Wisconsin. Perhaps it was a 'Sconsin conspiracy to get Illinois residents in trouble with their own government, like a cheesehead Sendero Luminoso.
Oh rats, it turns out that it was probably goats, not cows.
I thought we were discussing automobiles. [:D][;)]
Trabants weren’t automobiles, they were a joke played on German people. Such kidders, those commies making Germans desire such a POS. I am well familiar with Weymann bodied cars, I’ve even seen American cars such as the Stutz and Hudson with Weymann bodies in England. Also, my old man restored a 1947 Aeronca Champ in our garage and I recall the linen fabric when he and his friend sewed it over the frame with a baseball stitch and then doped it. Boy did that stink!
So this East German guy goes to “Trabants R’ Us” and puts his down payment in. “Gut! Sehr gut!” says the saleman. “Come back in five years from this date and it will be waiting for you.”
“In the morning or the afternoon?” asks the buyer.
“Why is that important?” asks the saleman."
“Uh, the plumber’s coming in the morning!”
Aside from Katarina Witt, the only decent thing to come out of East Germany is the “Praesentier Marsch Der Nationalen Volksarmee.”
It may be Communist, but it sounds so Prussian!
Major difference indeed…Though I have noticed our license plates tend to be peeling quite often these days…
Seriously, do flatlanders and cheeseheads hate each other that much? Packers? Bears? [*-)]
NY is having that problem big time…
Bears v. Packers is a 200-game long (100 years) rivalry that incites as least as much passion as Maple Leafs v. Canadiens, Navy v. Army, Auburn v. Alabama, etc. You have to be part of it to understand it.