CHOOSING MATERIALS

Despite all the trick titanium bolts or the occasional connecting rod, carbon-fiber-reinforced plastic (CFRP), and the odd bearing with silicon nitride balls, motorcycles are still mostly made of steel and aluminum. Do you recall the promise of plastic car engines that one person could easily pick up? Or NASA’s fun and games with no-weight carbon-carbon pistons? Or the wonderfully weird-looking carbon filament-wound con-rods that were so light that 25,000-rpm engines were just around the corner?

All these wonderful possibilities do actually exist, but making them practical takes serious money of the kind that Boeing invested in its 787 “Dreamliner,” much of whose structure is CFRP.

One measure of material performance that of the other metals! NASA has used the stuff for electronics racks in satellite applications, but the $10,000-per-pound cost of rocketing loads into low earth orbit makes it worth considering—even though dust from machin ing it is poisonous, and the metal is troublesome and expensive to produce.