Cork in place of foam

[QueticoBill]

The thread on sourcing foam got me thinking and hunting around - having some time after just having finished this week a 3-4 moth period of 12+ hour days 7 days a week - and I started thinking about cork - expanded cork panels - as the core for stressed skin panels - using ply skins. (No idea if a "corky" would ever be a possibility but possibly interesting appearance with fiberglass and epoxy over.)

Yes - about 5 times the cost of foam - but how much is the foam a part of the cost of a typical tear? $1000 instead of $200 in a $3000-10000 project? I don't know.

Not that its a big concern of mine but it is a much "greener" materiel with fewer documented health and fire hazards, and may be a little better acoustically. Hard to quantify.

I did find one link that has some info, which I have yet to thoroughly study. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5455286/

[GPW]

Experimental ??? … best build one and try it out , then tell us how you like it … no reason it wouldn’t work …

I thought cork trees were endangered , why everybody went to plastic corks and screw tops ??? … not sure

[QueticoBill]

It sems cork might be endangerd because of the move by wine makers from cork to plastic, thus less motivation to maintain the trees. Several hits suggested cork being endangered were a myth but that is the problem today, is its hard to really know.

[minstrel]

The wineries moved from cork to plastic/screw tops because the wine keeps better.....the loss from bottles "going bad" decreases significantly by scrapping the cork.

[QueticoBill]

The wineries moved from cork to plastic/screw tops because the wine keeps better.....the loss from bottles "going bad" decreases significantly by scrapping the cork.

I dont know which came fitst - plastic and metal csps cost much less than cork or do as goid as or better job than cork. Since some 70% of cork has been used for wine, its easy to see it as endangered because there is no market.

[low277]

I know that cork was used as insulation in large walk in freezers as late as the 1970s, I helped remove one from a old turkey processing plant in the 1980s, and where I work now there is still a old freezer that is insulated with cork, it is now used for record storage.