At 06:30 pm 25-02-05 -0500, Jed wrote: <snip>
> And so they were. Dismissed, despised and driven into exile. > > Remember kiddies: that is what you get for being right! > >- Jed Not necessarily, I'm happy to say. 8-) Many years ago when working at Building Research I was a member of the joint BRS/Pilkinton Bros. Steering Committee controlling the development of Glass Reinforced Cladding Panels. The glass fibre (Z Glass), which had been invented by a chemist at BRS, contained zirconium and, even uncoated, was ten times more resistant to OPC alkali attack than normal E Glass. Unfortunately it really needed to be 100 times more resistant as I pointed out, ad nauseum, to my bosses. When I saw the manufacturers manipulating the interpretation of BRS research data I began to doubt that the development would be successful. When the Pilkinton committee chairman (PB's "product champion") suddenly changed the design philosophy from ductile to brittle because our long term tests showed a disastrous drop in ultimate tensile strain (1 percent to 0.03 percent in 5 years) my doubts grew more serious. When on American Independence Day, 1974 the Chairman flew into a rage because I refused to go along with his wishful thinking about the shape of the deterioration curve, and screamed. "I'll hound you Grimer! I'll hound you! I'll hound you!" before bursting into tears. I knew the project was heading for the rocks. The committee was dissolved and a new committee was formed to which, needless to say, I was not invited [thank goodness 8-) ]. I resolved to start inspecting cladding panels after 5 years when they would have lost 97 percent of their strain capacity. Sure enough, at 5 years the panels on the 170 buildings I surveyed had started to crack up and had to be extensively replaced. The largest manufacturer of the panels went into liquidation and was taken over by Pilkintons. The three next largest went bust or dropped manufacture. I suppose one might say that, in a sense, I was exiled from the committee - but that's rather like being thrown into the briar bush, eh! Cheers, Frank Grimer
