Screw-in coffin patent issued | Hacker News Reader

Screw-in coffin patent issued

blog.makezine.com

25 pointsthere20 comments

This is hilarious, but probably not viable:

a) Coffins are sold to grieving families on the basis of "the one last thing you can do for [deceased]". Hence sales are made based on how luxurious, etc. the coffin is, not how efficiently it bores into the ground.

b) Who is going to want to file past a gigantic drill bit in a church?

c) If you look at the silhouette in fig 6, the coffin is roughly 40% longer than the deceased. Hence to bury a 6 foot tall individual, the coffin will need to be ~ 8.5 feet long, too tall to be screwed in by hand.

d) Part of the point of burials is the ceremony of lowering the coffin into the grave. This won't be viable with the screw coffin - "alright folks, it's time to bury Dad. Now these two hefty blokes are going to take a quarter of an hour to screw him into the ground. You all stand there and listen to him bump around inside the coffin".

I believe most countries have a minimum depth that bodies have to be buried at. That is going to be hard to achieve with these kind of coffins.

I don't know why there couldn't be 'filler' space at the top put there just to achieve the depth requirements.

Well, assuming the minimum depth is even as low as three feet, the deceased is up to six feet tall and there's maybe a foot of additional space (thickness of coffin, the pointy drill bit, satin pillows, etc.) you're now looking at a ten foot long coffin. This seems to be a bit unwieldy at best, particularly when you've got to stand it up to bore into the ground.

You can have a funeral in winter before the frost line raises, however it'll destroy this. Frost doesn't stop a backhoe, I'd bet a lot of money it would stop this because the torque required to break and shift frozen soil is immense, especially considering it has to displace its entire volume around the coffin.

Well, to be fair, the entire idea is really quite stupid (in my opinion.) It's novel, to be sure, but realistically, at least in most of the US, it would just be easier to use a boring drill to make the hole, and then lower a regular (or even torpedo-shaped) coffin into it.

It's just a mausoleum with a really deep foundation.

This will give a whole new meaning to "turning in one's grave".

Yow. Would be less expensive to have a drill to make the hole with, then lower the coffin in, then to build the drill into the coffin.

Or to cremate.

This actually is a novel idea. And it saves space. Pack more deads per square meter.

I imagine making every single coffin into a drill capable of boring a hole into the earth is a lot more expensive than buying a couple of sets of digging equipment per cemetery.

On the other hand, if you're going to bring in machinery, you need to make sure that there's enough space to stop them from crushing the other coffins - which might negate any space-savings from burying people vertically. Whereas with this, a few people put it in, which needs very little space. Besides, don't the families of deceased generally pay for their coffins?

I think finding people who can manhandle an abnormally large, heavy, drill shaped coffin into place will be harder and more expensive than using machinery - there's a reason why we don't dig graves by hand any more.

Families do pay for the coffins, but they also pay for burial costs as well (so they'd also be paying for space and a portion of the machinery).

This might be worth it in some very old cemeteries in Europe, given considerations mentioned in other comments about the coffin being 10 feet tall.

Of course cremation saves more space and is certainly cheaper.

My personal funeral arrangement is going to be on the lines of "throw my corpse on a pile of logs and light her up", if my survivors want something fancy, that's their deal I'm already dead, just get it over and done with and carry on with life.

I'm either getting an autopsy or donating when I die, either way I'm going to be stuffed with sawdust. I'm not going to make good worm food, so you might as well torch me.

Completely besides the point, but: sawdust is perfectly useful as fertilizer, so it's actually not that bad as worm food.

I can't find anything online, but I can recall reading that Christian heathens were buried vertically, because this meant that they could not enter heaven. Is there anything like this in other religions (especially other monotheistic ones)?

There'll be plenty of non-religious folks who could opt for this or another form of vertical burial, but I wonder how many people or their families would simply opt for the traditional, religious burial.

Pallbearer? No, thank you.

(Though really I think the casket is INSIDE the screw. If it's not, that will by my new invention: "Easy corpse retrieval system" is how I'll bill it, and mostly to those singularity folks. "Be the first one out once we figure out how to cure stuff. No messing digging or accidentally crushing the casket!)

At the risk of being downvoted, the phrase "What's up, doc?" was the first thing that came to mind.

The opportunity for ridicule has probably killed many an invention (i.e. Nokia and "side-talking").

Reply on news.ycombinator.com