4 ms·

Wood has a grippier texture which I'd consider the top factor when it comes to practicality of chopsticks.

by j_4 4y ago

mgdlbp 4y ago
Looks like there are steel ones with textured tips. The engraving doesn't look very pronounced, so not sure if there'll be much difference. I wonder why no ones makes them outright knurled--shouldn't be any harder to clean in a dishwasher.
- eru 4y ago
  Well, once you add engravings and other texture stuff to make your metal chopsticks grippier, they are become grippier for bacteria. Thus eliminating one of the justifications brought up in favour of metal chopsticks.
  - j_4 4y ago
    Yeah. Also - it makes perfect sense in retrospect, but I was surprised to learn that wood tends to have decent antimicrobial properties. We had it right 10000 years ago, it's a great material for cutting boards and utensils. https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation.aspx?paperid=90527 https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation.aspx?paperid=...
  - mgdlbp 4y ago
    Wouldn't that be another case for knurling like that common on metal knobs, where the grooves are too large a scale to trap clumps of bacteria? It'll prevent mechanical scrubbing, but if a dishwasher is acceptable for cleaning between fork tines where the surfaces are blocked from direct spray, then the shadowed parts of a knurled surface shouldn't be a problem. Total surface area would of course increase, but only around double.* That'd be all, but I found something interesting when trying to look up what threshold of roughness is too coarse for trapping bacteria. Didn't end up finding that; the interesting fact is that despite bacteria growth increasing in most surfaces when deviating from a smooth polish, stainless steel actually exhibits less bacterial growth when roughened very finely, on the order of tens of nanometres of Ra (mean absolute deviation of height of a cross section from the mean line, though it seems the fractal nature of roughness means the order of magnitude of measurement depends on the measurement method). That's according to [1][2] and their citations; one of them gives an explanation of the cell membrane being limited by bend radius, so that when roughening a surface at a sufficiently small scale, the contact area bacteria can make decreases rather than increases. No idea about the implications of nanoscale surface finishing on gripping food, though. [1] Ctrl+F "surface roughness" https://doi.org/10.3389/fbioe.2021.643722 https://doi.org/10.3389/fbioe.2021.643722 [2] https://doi.org/10.1021/acsbiomaterials.7b00544 https://doi.org/10.1021/acsbiomaterials.7b00544 *nerdsnipe: By what factor of cut angle, pitch, and angle between passes does knurling increase surface area, if knurling is modelled as an extrude-cut along a line of a triangle wave profile into a face of the raw material, followed by a second pass of another at an angle to the first line, and completed by rolling the resulting face into a cylinder? The simple case of a 90 degree cut to full depth in only one direction increases profile length (and thus surface area) by sqrt(2), but does a second cut make something elegant like a tidy factor of 2?

Wood has a grippier texture which I'd consider the top factor when it comes to practicality of chopsticks.

by j_4 4y ago

Wood has a grippier texture which I'd consider the top factor when it comes to practicality of chopsticks.

Looks like there are steel ones with textured tips. The engraving doesn't look very pronounced, so not sure if there'll be much difference. I wonder why no ones makes them outright knurled--shouldn't be any harder to clean in a dishwasher.

eru 4y ago
Well, once you add engravings and other texture stuff to make your metal chopsticks grippier, they are become grippier for bacteria. Thus eliminating one of the justifications brought up in favour of metal chopsticks.
- j_4 4y ago
  Yeah. Also - it makes perfect sense in retrospect, but I was surprised to learn that wood tends to have decent antimicrobial properties. We had it right 10000 years ago, it's a great material for cutting boards and utensils. https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation.aspx?paperid=90527 https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation.aspx?paperid=...
- mgdlbp 4y ago
  Wouldn't that be another case for knurling like that common on metal knobs, where the grooves are too large a scale to trap clumps of bacteria? It'll prevent mechanical scrubbing, but if a dishwasher is acceptable for cleaning between fork tines where the surfaces are blocked from direct spray, then the shadowed parts of a knurled surface shouldn't be a problem. Total surface area would of course increase, but only around double.* That'd be all, but I found something interesting when trying to look up what threshold of roughness is too coarse for trapping bacteria. Didn't end up finding that; the interesting fact is that despite bacteria growth increasing in most surfaces when deviating from a smooth polish, stainless steel actually exhibits less bacterial growth when roughened very finely, on the order of tens of nanometres of Ra (mean absolute deviation of height of a cross section from the mean line, though it seems the fractal nature of roughness means the order of magnitude of measurement depends on the measurement method). That's according to [1][2] and their citations; one of them gives an explanation of the cell membrane being limited by bend radius, so that when roughening a surface at a sufficiently small scale, the contact area bacteria can make decreases rather than increases. No idea about the implications of nanoscale surface finishing on gripping food, though. [1] Ctrl+F "surface roughness" https://doi.org/10.3389/fbioe.2021.643722 https://doi.org/10.3389/fbioe.2021.643722 [2] https://doi.org/10.1021/acsbiomaterials.7b00544 https://doi.org/10.1021/acsbiomaterials.7b00544 *nerdsnipe: By what factor of cut angle, pitch, and angle between passes does knurling increase surface area, if knurling is modelled as an extrude-cut along a line of a triangle wave profile into a face of the raw material, followed by a second pass of another at an angle to the first line, and completed by rolling the resulting face into a cylinder? The simple case of a 90 degree cut to full depth in only one direction increases profile length (and thus surface area) by sqrt(2), but does a second cut make something elegant like a tidy factor of 2?