Experimental Hook-and-Loop Attachment System for Walls and Floors | Hacker News Reader

Experimental Hook-and-Loop Attachment System for Walls and Floors

core77.com

18 pointssurprisetalk16 comments

This will never catch on in the building industry unless it can demonstrate significant time/cost savings.

If it does get adopted, those time/cost savings are going to be skewed towards the initial building phase, and renovation will get more expensive. Sure, a renovator can remove the surface layer easier, but then they either have to resurface the existing one, or buy a new one, both of which are guaranteed to be more costly than resurfacing ordinary drywall (or just papering over the existing wallpaper).

I am puzzled. They mention velcro doesn't work with rigid surfaces, but when they show a picture of what I assume is their solution, it seems to utilise ... "a flexible sheet material", i.e. a non-rigid surface.

Then the logical conclusion is that they meant that velcro doesn't work when at least one of the surfaces is rigid.

Perhaps the flexible sheet is just used so it can be peeled back to reveal the mechanics of the connecting bits--perhaps the flexibility is purely pedagogical.

Why are you puzzled? "Doesn't work with rigid surfaces" shows it working with a non rigid surface. Of course what the article says is a true system didn't work with a rigid surface, but they came up with something close.

Slightly off-topic, but recently I had the thought that it would be fun to implement a hook-and-loop system with the hooks and loops made from heavy guage wire embedded in concrete or welded to steel. Could such a system be strong enough to lift hundreds of tons? Perhaps it could be used to rapidly assemble military infrastructure like bridges or defensive structures--literally velcro the pieces together.

But would this approach be better than other current approaches where things slide together with some simple locking mechanism. And if this hard-core metal vecro worked as well as you hoped, how would you get it apart?

It's hard to beat slapping something together. It might not come apart, or maybe a shape memory alloy could be used for the hooks?

So I'm fond of the goal, and experimentation is good, but couldn't you get the sameish result by using screws to attach things?

It's not trivial to attach something heavy to an interior drywall.

This is using concrete though. It is pretty trivial to attach heavy things to concrete with screws.

I think the only reason you wouldn't use screws is if you don't want to leave a hole (but then you probably don't want weird knobs sticking out), or if it's meant to be temporary.

Screws spread the force out over about 1/16 sq in. A mere 4x4" of this stuff would spread it out over 256 times that area.

Screws don't really support the weight of the object they are holding. They pull that object into the wall. The resulting friction is what holds most of the weight.

To see this, try loosening the screw, and notice how it quickly looses the ability to resist forces perpendicular to the screw; whereas it's ability to resist forces in the direction of the screw is largely unchanged.

Interesting idea. Some obvious thoughts:

1. Those little nubs of concrete are going to snap off in about 5 seconds. Might work for other materials though I guess.

2. What's the advantage over just attaching velcro to the wall?

3. French cleats exist. This probably covers most use cases.

Fun experiment though.

1. Exactly.

2. Less adhesive? Not sure.

3. Exactly.

Tangential, are there additives to give shear/tensile or other strengths to non-cube concrete shapes?

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