Building a better nail.

My relatives on the Gulf Coast (which is just about all of them) should see this.

That is quite cool, but I hope the fact it was mentioned in PopSci doesn't curse it irrevocably.

Hmmmm, better nails, or concrete and steel? I vote for the latter.

I'm kind of leaning toward Mr. Young's point of view here. Even if we design the perfect nail, who's going to grow the perfect tree from which to harvest perfect lumber through which to drive that perfect nail?

Perfect is the enemy of good enough. The point is to make the buildings better than they were, at an affordable cost, not to make them 'perfect'. The failures were occuring in the fasteners, not in the wood, so making the wood stronger would have gained little.

It looks to me like they just reinvented the screw.

It looks to me like they just reinvented the screw.

Screws take much longer to insert, even with power tools, and labor costs dominate in home construction.

Computer Science at its best!

To speed up a program with the least amount of work, you don't try to make the whole thing faster--you find out where the bottlenecks are and make those faster.

To improve the building with the least amount of cost and effort, you don't try to improve the whole building, you figure out where it's breaking and improve that.

I heard a story once that Ford went looking in junkyards to determine the failures in Model T's. Apparently there were all kinds of failures in all kinds of parts. Except for one--there was one item, a joint I think, that was never broken in a single Model T in a junkyard. The story went on that Ford decided therefore that they could save money by making a less sturdy joint.

Paul,

Look at the picture in the article -- it's a screw you shoot out of a nail gun. I admire the synthesis - combining what's good a about a screw with what's good about a nail.

Kevin