Having come from an industry that dealt in Balsa, here's some humbling numbers...
90% of havested balsa is used in industry as a sound insulator and a heat insulator. Of this ratio, 70% goes to lining large Cryogenic tanks on ocean tankers that transfer natural or liquid gas around the globe. It is NOT pretty/nice/white/c-grain/no-worm holes/4# pound wood so no need to salivate. IT is the crappy commodity stuff that drives the market. BTW, GM toyed with using a balsa and aluminum sandwich in the floors to quiet road noise in Vettes.
.99% goes to the craft and hobby industry. More rare in the grand scheme
of balsa production mostly do to the labor to just find and grade the wood.
.01% is good enough to be considered for an F1D. Obviously the rarest and just another layer of labor cost to locate and process.
Wanna get into the kit business? To be competitive, you have to order a "Container" at about $10K for "decent" wood. It still needs to be graded, cut and sanded down to .020.(To go thinner is really special tooling). Of that maybe 30% you would be proud to be in your kit that features 8# wood. So you have to market the other 70%.
Without the industry usage of crappy comodity balsa, our sport & hobby wood prices would rise- exponentially.
Tom Sanders
Received on Thu Oct 14 2010 - 12:35:57 CEST
This archive was generated by Yannick on Sat Dec 14 2019 - 19:13:46 CET