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Old 11-23-2017, 03:45 PM   #15
DanHoward
 
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Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: Maitland, NSW, Australia
Default Re: [LT] Armor Design: Silk and Spider Silk

The search engine is your friend. This is from 2010.

http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?t=74197


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... Use the Wired article if you want more detail.

"To produce this unique golden cloth, 70 people spent four years collecting golden orb spiders from telephone poles in Madagascar, while another dozen workers carefully extracted about 80 feet of silk filament from each of the arachnids. The resulting 11-foot by 4-foot textile is the only large piece of cloth made from natural spider silk existing in the world today."

If I'm reading it correctly, you have 82 people extracting silk for four years to make a single 11x4' piece of cloth that weighs 2.6 lbs. On top of that you need someone to weave the cloth.

Here is another tidbit
"Camboué built a small, hand-driven machine to extract silk from up to 24 spiders at once, without harming them."

The question is whether this machine could be constructed using Low-Tech (TL0-TL4) technology.

More
"Fourteen thousand spiders yields about an ounce of silk"

"Once the spiders had been milked, they were released into back into the wild, where Godley said it takes them about a week to regenerate their silk."

It is one of the best articles I've seen for pulling out information that modellers can use. You wouldn't believe the frustration when writing Low-Tech. A lot of the practical information we needed for trying to model various ancient technologies was incredibly hard to find.
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Last edited by DanHoward; 11-23-2017 at 03:57 PM.
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