Gearhead wrote:
It's just that I find the skate story hard to believe. As you know speed skating is as important where I come from as cricket is here, and the research into skating is being pushed by skate sales and commercial interests. What I understood from the skate magazines is that the skate manufacturers are in fact not looking for the ideal most slippery surface, rather the surface should have a certain roughness. The other important thing seems to be hardness, and that not just for wear. It seems the interaction between ice and skate is influenced by this and that there are tiny molecule clusters that act as balls once they get squashed between skate and the ice surface. People used to think there is water forming but they disqualified that as a possibility since the energy equations do not add up.
Anyway: we're not supposed to call it Teflon anymore, you will also find it under PTFE for poly tetra fluor ethylene, it is very slippery indeed and I sincerely think that the rounded surface of unwound and wound stings alike will see less friction of a ptfe coated surface.
Interesting. Perhaps what I saw was a new development/prototype or something like that. In any case it was just an example, the teflon 'frictionless' skates under some high-end computer mice would be another one.
Why can we not call it Teflon? I know it is trademarked like Velcro.
I prefer to call it teflon because then people know what you are referring to. In the Engineering world we would call it PTFE. Sometimes we also use PEEK, or Polyetherethertone, a higher tensile strength material, also used for bushings and sliding bearings, or PPS for super low temperature applications. However, we usually still end up calling it teflon, or Hostaflon or Fluon hehe. The same thing happens with "mild steel" - there is basically no such thing. Each country has their own mixes of steels, but the common stuff you buy is called mild steel, not ISO 1045 etc... What makes PTFE interesting is its low coefficient of friction, but also high density for a thermoplastic and its insolubility in solvents.
Although it is good for maintenance free bearings and so on, I wonder how long these black tusq nuts actually last? Surely to make them hard wearing the amount of injected PTFE is almost negligible?
EDIT: Those clapper skates are an awesome invention BTW, although I dont mix well with skating - I tend to end up ice skating on my face every time I come near an ice rink - my face and the ice are like magnets ?
