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Unlike most commercial plastics, the Boyer sheets for automobiles look like polished steel. Test panels are 70% cellulose fibre, 30% resin binder, pressed into cloth. Alone the cloth has little strength. But several sheets heat-molded in a 1,000-ton press produce a material superior to steel in everything but tensile strength. It is 50% lighter, 50% cheaper, ten times stronger. Bent like a jackknife in a huge press, plastic panels snap back into shape when the pressure is released. Continual assaults with heavy axes, hammers have no visible effect on the shiny, rustless panels. Their color is not paint but inbred in the plastic. Fenders of this Buck Rogers material, though not quite unbreakable, withdraw from minor collisions with lamp posts, etc., like unhurried rubber balls.
To make his super-plastic. Ford is going to the soil. One million plastic automobiles (average annual Ford production) would consume 50,000 tons of synthetic chemicals, 170,000 tons of agricultural products. Possible makeup: 100,000 bales of cotton (U. S. annual output 12,000,000 bales); 500,000 bushels of wheat (current production 792,332,000 bushels, surplus 250,000,000); 700,000 bushels of soybeans (81,541,000 bushels grown this year); 500,000 bushels of corn (ten-year average yield 2,299,342,000 bushels); lesser amounts of hides, lard, glue, pine pitch, sugar-cane alcohol and flax. Imported materials would be cork, rubber, tung oil and ramie, Egyptian mummy-wrapping fibre. Best of all, wheat, corn and soybeans are interchangeable. Ford can use all three, or only one.
Once formed, Ford's plastic has not the tensile strength of steel, hence will not be used for frame, chassis or motor blocks. But sheets account for half the steel that goes into modern automobiles. If Ford's plastic bodies become universal, total U. S. use of steel may be cut 10%. Worried, steelmen sent a long-nosed research committee to Dearborn last month, have not peeped since.
On the surface Henry Ford and Robert Boyer have done more to plague steelmakers than to solve the farm problem. But if their dream is true, the technological novelty known as plastics has graduated from its celluloid-and-Beetleware phase into an instrument of industrial revolution.