pykrete

Barney II · February 01, 2013, 06:37:50 PM

have been watching too much boop tube----but a good question---what is pykrete? According to the experts they built an aircraft carrier with it.

tyb525 · February 01, 2013, 07:06:33 PM

Sawdust and ice. Molded kind of like concrete.

No aircraft carrier was ever build from it, but someone did build a ship out of pure ice.

Mythbusters build a boat out of "super pykrete" using newspaper instead of sawdust, and it worked, but only for about 20 minutes then it started springing leaks as it melted.

DeepWoods · February 01, 2013, 07:20:05 PM

18 percent sawdust by weight added to water then frozen. They wanted to build an aircraft carrier, but ended up not nessasary as England's Air Force was able to destroy the German submarines. Just watched Modern Marvels ice episode. Turns out that they couldn't break the pykrete with a hammer, and a block of ice the same size would basically explode with one blow. They did make a scale model of the air craft carrier, it took two years to melt and sink. The wooden frame is still at the bottom of the lake they tested it on. Hope I remembered all of this correctly, I am just a little cabin crazy as our winter temps have been quite low and we have been shacked up for the last few weeks. Last night we had -35 for an overnight low. Hard to get anything done with temps like that. Daytime temps not even above zero.

Tyb525 ya beat me to it, my fingers don't type to fast in this cold