I’ve just found this great site and thought it would be a good place to ask a question that has been bugging me for ages.
In a series on TV Scraphead (junkyard wars in the US) there was an engineer. When he was learning his trade his class was asked to build out of 4 sheets of A4 paper a structure that would hold the weight of a full Coke can. One of the groups built a tower that was 2 meters tall.
How is this possible? I know you whould have to build the tower to take the weight as tension but I can not work out how.
That, or build it so that the paper is in compression, with no bending forces. Maybe they cut the sheets lengthwise and rolled out three columns. Maybe they just made one column with the diameter of a coke can and got lucky.
I am not saying it is impossible but I doubt it. if you take the surface of four DIN A4 and make it a rectangle 200 cm long you get a strip 12.5 cm (5") wide. With this you could make a tube 4 cm (1.5’) in diameter or a cross section with arms (radio) = 6.25 cm. I have neglected all overlaps for glueing. As I say, not impossible, but I’d like to see it done. Maybe it is impossible… or we are missing something.