Having sent those, I, as you, am not convinced that "holding water" or other solvents expands the felt, or whether the "sidewalls" of the fibers absorb solvents and expand. We'd need another series of pics which are before and after treatment with various solvents. Paul In a message dated 2/14/2011 7:23:05 P.M. Central Standard Time, fssturm at unm.edu writes: On Feb 13, 2011, at 8:40 AM, Dale Erwin wrote: I'm curious. I learned from Jack Brand (during the Weickert felt trials) at Wurzen felt that wool fibers are hollow, which is why they can hold so much moisture. ie rugs, sweaters etc This statement caught my eye, and has made me wonder. Are wool fibers, in fact, hollow? I sort of doubt it, but I don't know. Does anyone actually know for certain? My take on wool absorbing water is not that there is a "hollow spot inside to hold it," but that the wool fibers themselves (that is, the material itself of the fibers, the proteins I suppose) "attract" and "absorb" the water (quotes because I'm sure there are scientific terms for these things that I don't happen to know). Kind of like the protein in gelatin, or in hide glue. In any case, the individual fibers do swell in the presence of water - I am pretty certain of that. In swelling, they spread out their little scales so that those will tend to interlock with the scales of other fibers, all of them being pressed more tightly together because the space between them is taken up by all of them swelling, if they are constrained in some way (as in center bushing felt, for instance, constrained between the pin and the wood). This is a part of the felting process. Do they swell with lacquer, or the various solvents associated with it? I don't think so. In any case, drenching hammers in lacquer thinner, acetone, or alcohol doesn't seem to make them expand, or leave them larger than before. Water does make them expand and they end up larger than before. So I don't think we know whether the solids in lacquer penetrate the wool fibers when we dope hammers. I have always pictured it as coating the fibers. And have wished that someone would do electron micrography on lacquered hammers so we could see. Regards, Fred Sturm _fssturm at unm.edu_ (mailto:fssturm at unm.edu) _http://www.youtube.com/fredsturm_ (http://www.youtube.com/fredsturm) = -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/caut.php/attachments/20110214/b62e869d/attachment.htm>
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