Hacker News Reader

Comment by zarify | Hacker News Reader

I wish one of their FAQ down the bottom was about water resistance.

There's probably a good reason they didn't mention that, or durability.

I do some leatherwork for fun and there's a lot of things that make it hard to replace. We'll see how it holds up when stitched.

I'm very open to trying it out, though. And maybe an upholstery waterproofer would do the job.

The fun part here is that, technically, once they get a 'good enough' product and workflow up and running, adding/changing/incorporating biological properties is (mostly) just a DNA-based bit-flip away.

We at Serotiny are already collecting protein domains from organisms with various capabilities - including water solubility, hydrophobicity, enzymatic capabilities, covalent attachment sites (for dyes), light-activated properties/crosslinking/dissociation/etc. And all of those protein domains we're collecting should be 100% compatible (+/- a fair bit of a tooling-exercise) with both Bolt's leather and their silk.

So it should get fun once they have a solid and stable 'platform' up and running. They will be able to incorporate most any property from nature with an existing proof of principal, not just any property form mammalian hides.

Congratulations guys!

As someone who does a fair bit of sewing I have to wonder if this is going to behave more like a "fabric" with leather like qualities.

From the description (and it isn't much) I'm guessing that this is going to drape much like felt. Is that close to leather? Well it is closer than most woven fabrics but leather and felt behave much differently.

I would also expect that this is going to cost far more than actual leather does.

I certainly wouldn't mind my next metal battle vest out of mycelium leather, just for the geek cred, deck it out with hardwood studs and do an enviro theme thing.

Well leather isn't really water resistant to begin with: ask any biker. It'll hold up to a light rain, but anything more you shouldn't expose leather to unless it's been waxed relatively recently. And once it is wet, if you dry it too quickly (like on a radiator) it'll likely shrivel up permanently, dry it too slow and it might rot.

Really the bar is set quite low for fake leather being waterproof.

Most hot-stuffed pull-up leathers are water resistant because of the incredible amount of waxes and oils added. Pull-up leather is often used in boots and duffels for that reason. Veg tan leathers can be made water resistent with Resolene or a TON of surfaces waxes like Carnauba.

Source: I work with a lot of leather.

I suppose I didn't consider the amount of additives in current leathers. What are the production costs (environmental, rather than monetary) of the waterproofing? It would be a shame to have something that has very limited impact on the environment being used as a substitute for leather, only to find out the post processing is also quite damaging.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com