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The Rise and Rise of Corrugated Iron
- throwawaysea 5y agoI often wonder why these aren’t the material of choice for interior uses as well. Why does everything use drywall, which requires the messiness of mudding and taping and so on? I feel like a metal panel system that is removable would be much more durable and would allow access to the in-between spaces more easily.
- Turing_Machine 5y agoMetal makes for unpleasant acoustics. Probably you could spray some kind of sound-absorbent layer over it, but then you'd be back to messiness again.
- toomanybeersies 5y agoFor starters, metal interior panels seems like a great way to get electrocuted.
- lostlogin 5y agoScrewed on ply sheets look better, perform better and meet your requirements I think?
- stephen_g 5y agoI've seen aluminium panelling used in interiors (in commercial buildings) which works. Steel I think would mostly be too heavy for interior cladding.
- neonate 5y agohttps://archive.is/3KpnA https://archive.is/3KpnA
- tgtweak 5y agoThanks, you reminded me to donate to the indispensable free things we take for granted. https://archive.org/donate/ https://archive.org/donate/
- nopenopenopeno 5y agoShould be publicly funded tbh
- mechanical_bear 5y agoNah.
- desine 5y agoI agree, but it should also be immutable, and only the former with the latter. Especially with the political scrubbing of past news articles.
- mlinksva 5y agoPlease do support archive.org (Internet Archive) but archive.is is a different entity (which apparently one can donate to, though not sure of its structure), see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive.today https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive.today
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- alex_duf 5y agoAlthough I do agree with the mission of archiving content, I find it quite interesting to be willing to pay for an organisation to archive content as a way to get content for free rather than pay for the content itself. It's a bit of a conundrum because we need both, so ideally everyone would pay for both. It costs money to archive content, it also costs money to produce it. Now this is under the assumption you're praising archiving services as a workaround paywalls, but I may have misinterpreted your comment: in which case feel free to correct me!
- yob28 5y ago
- tyingq 5y agoSteel roofing seems like a fairly upscale thing now, just not with that wavy corrugated shape. The alternating wide flat area, then small rib pattern is the one I see around the most.
- yeetaccount4 5y agoThose will last basically forever. The rib covers the fasteners and prevents water intrusion. The old style corrugated stuff leaks pretty bad unless you torque the screws juuuust right. Pretty sure the grommets under the screw heads degrade after a while, even if you get them perfect.
- rootusrootus 5y agoThere's a housing project local to me that installed a bunch of these metal roofs about 20 years ago, and very few are left, they've been replacing them with asphalt shingles. I'm not aware of why, but I presume something went wrong. Certainly the gov't spends as little as it can get away with on those houses, they probably thought it would be cheaper in the long run than asphalt when they did it.
- lostlogin 5y agoIt blows my mind that one could screw up corrugated iron roofing. It lasts a long time and is pretty basic to install. Many old villas here in New Zealand have their roofs replaced and they are about 100 years old. Arthur’s Pass down south has houses entirely clad in an every version of the stuff (it’s thick and heavy) and they are over 100 years old now.
- nerdponx 5y agoThat, or, some politician made a deal with a roofing company to get some perfectly good roofs replaced.
- orthoxerox 5y agoInstalling them requires qualified labor. You have to crimp each standing seam just right for the roof to remain watertight. Installing corrugated iron or shingles is much easier in comparison.
- JasonFruit 5y agoWhen I built a turkey coop this past spring, plywood price was at its peak, so I decided I'd side and roof it with 18-gauge steel. It was quick, easy, looks great, and has proven itself weather-tight. I love working with wood, but I have to say the ease, cost, and looks of the steel have converted me for this purpose. Also, > More intuitively, consider a common pizza-eating strategy: gently bending your slice before bringing it to your mouth obviates the risk of buckling and consequent mess. is a perfect, natural analogy. Why can I never come up with such beautiful explanations?
- enchiridion 5y agoIMO good analogies come from a place of empathy. An understanding that the people you are talking to are not dumb, just uninitiated. Not sure how applicable that observation is. Just sharing a thought.
- dmurray 5y ago> is a perfect, natural analogy. Why can I never come up with such beautiful explanations? Good writers borrow: great writers steal. It would be nice to come up with the right analogy from whole cloth, but especially in non-fiction writing it's almost as good to recognize a great analogy or turn of phrase, store it away in your mind, and reproduce it (rewritten in the house style, perhaps) when you need the mot juste for your own readers. I've heard the analogy before, and I suspect the writer or editor of the Economist had too.
- CoastalCoder 5y agoI can't access the article, so out of curiosity, why isn't rust a problem?
- tyingq 5y agoDespite the name, it's usually steel, not iron. And a newer galvanization process that's a mixture of aluminum and zinc.
- analog31 5y agoSteel does rust, but good metallurgy and coatings help. I live in the upper Midwest where road salt is used quite heavily, yet the prevalence of super rusty cars has really diminished. Steel items that are not exposed to salt either rust much more slowly, or develop a patina that slows further rusting. That's not quite so easy in coastal areas.
- gadflyinyoureye 5y agoModern stuff is treated. Old stuff like a roof I had was just thicker than modern. The roof was standing seams at probably 30-40 years old. While there was rust, it was superficial. Takes a long time rust clear through even in Florida.
- zzzbra 5y agothe rust looks cool tho: https://instagram.com/totanmania_0 https://instagram.com/totanmania_0
- NickNameNick 5y agoIn my area, corrugated steel is sold with 'zinc-alum' and powder-coating pre-applied. I think they also apply paint to cut edges and drilled holes during installation. Its extremely popular, probably seen on around 50% of roofs, and is also used for exterior cladding on a lot of new houses. (although as cladding, it's usually used for only half the house, alternating with some other cladding)
- lordgrenville 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galvanization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galvanization
- zzzbra 5y agomost under utilized building material
- hollerith 5y agoThe article claims that some aircraft have been made with corrugated iron or steel: >aircraft hangars, aircraft themselves But I doubt that. (Corrugated aluminum, sure.)
- intrepidhero 5y agoI thought of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Trimotor https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Trimotor, corrugated but as you suspected, aluminum.
- brazzy 5y agoPerhaps most iconic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junkers_Ju_52 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junkers_Ju_52
- Turing_Machine 5y agoThe Junkers J1 was made from steel, some corrugated, some not, so it is just possible to make one fly. It was a real pig in the air, by all accounts.
- hollerith 5y agoThanks. The Wikipedia page says that only one J1 was built.
- HideousKojima 5y agoNot sure about corrugated, but the Mig-25 was all stainless steel
- rndm_access 5y agoThe MiG-25 was constructed from 80% nickel-steel alloy, 11% aluminium, and 9% titanium according to source cited on wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikoyan-Gurevich_MiG-25#cite_note-Eden_p308-23 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikoyan-Gurevich_MiG-25#cite_n...
- stevejb 5y agoI live in rural Australia. Corrugated iron is everywhere, and I love it. It is durable, lasts a really long time, is easy to repurpose. I know an older gentleman here who built a really nice barn out of some repurposed corrugated iron roofing. I'm about to build a shed for a home office, and will use corrugated iron. It is cheap, easy to work with, comes in decent colors (e.g. the ColorBond brand in Australia), is strong without being overengineered. It's great stuff.
- phillc73 5y agoI grew up in rural Australia (now a long way from there) and one of my memory triggers is the sound of old corrugated iron ‘ticking’ and ‘pinging’ after a day in the hot sun.
- dkdbejwi383 5y agoYeah, that and the lovely tap-tap-tap of the rain on a tin roof
- somishere 5y agoAgreed. Colourbond on our house and shed, and most in the street. Next door's 40yo corrugated shed roof is a work of rust orange beauty. The sounds on a hot day too ... unmistakable and so of the place :)
- te_chris 5y agoAs a NZer, I say about time you all caught up.
- toomanybeersies 5y agoPerhaps the most unorthodox use of corrugated iron was the Bob Semple tank [1] of WWII. It was basically a corrugated iron shell on a Caterpillar D8 chassis, with 6 machine guns for armament. The eponymous designer and New Zealand's Minister for Works at the time, Bob Semple, based his design off a photo of an American tank he had on a postcard. Needless to say, it wasn't exactly successful. Only 3 prototypes were built, none were used in combat, and they were eventually converted back into tractors. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Semple_tank https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Semple_tank