Diamond Cuttings Wood Doors Paintballs Newspapers
Today on "how it's made"... Diamond cutting... Wood doors... Paintballs... And newspapers. Diamonds are rare crystals composed mostly of carbon. They're the hardest natural substance on earth. A superb cut manipulates light to maximize a stone's brilliance. That enhances the diamond's beauty and increases its value. Diamonds come in a variety of colors, the most common of which for jewelry is white. They begin as a larger, rough stone. The goal is to cut as big a diamond as possible from it while cutting away any imperfections that lessen the value. To do this precision work, master diamond cutters use a magnifying glass that enlarges the stone 10 times. They carefully examine and re-examine the rough diamond, trying to determine the best way to divide the stone. They must saw the diamond in the direction of its grain, then, using hot glue, secure the rough diamond into a holder positioned over the saw. The saw has a very fine bronze blade, but it can't cut through the diamond on its own. Only diamond can cut diamond, so they coat the blade in a mixture of diamond dust and oil. Sawing an average-size rough diamond in two can take up to four hours. The second stage of diamond cutting is called polishing. It's the process of forming the diamond. A special machine first tailors the basic shape. Then the diamond cutter puts glue in a mounting tool called a dop. This will hold the diamond firmly in place. He presses the diamond against a spinning cast-iron wheel coated with a mixture of diamond dust and oil. First, he removes any marks that were left by the saw. Then, to give the stone its brilliance, he forms facets-- a particular pattern of tiny, flat sides of various shapes. The facets are designed to reflect light off each other. Each one must be exactly the right size and shape and cut at precisely the right angle in relation to the other facets to create maximum brilliance. Here he starts with the table facet, which is the flat top of the diamond. How he proceeds depends on the size and condition of the stone. Then come the pavilions-- the angled facets that end in a point at the bottom of the diamond. If they're cut too deep or too shallow, light will leak out the bottom, making the diamond dark in the center and dull overall. The ideal slope is approximately 42 degrees. The diamond cutter uses specialized tools to measure the angle. Next, the diamond cutter fashions crown facets-- the ones circling the diamond directly under the table. Using another type of dop, the diamond cutter fashions what's called the girdle-- the faceted rim that separates the crown facets around the top half of the diamond and the pavilion facets below. Diamonds are weighed using a measurement called karats. One karat weighs 0.007 ounces. Polishing a one-karat diamond can take three or four hours. When it's done, they boil it in acid to remove any debris. This finished diamond has 58 facets. It's called a brilliant cut. It's by far the most common style of cut, dating back to the 1600s. The quality of the cut is a key factor in grading diamonds. Experts also rate what's called the clarity-- the degree of imperfections in the stone. Then there's color. The finest white diamonds are completely colorless, and the rarest colors are the most valuable. Coming soon to a supermarket near you-- food that tells you when it's gone bad. Researchers are developing electronic devices that monitor food freshness and detect potentially fatal bacteria like e. coli. These devices on the packaging would give off a signal when the food inside spoils. We open and close them several times a day, day in and day out and seldom give them a second thought, but imagine your home without doors. For one thing, you'd have absolutely no privacy. And what would you slam when you get angry? The first factory makes the door's plywood facing. They start by loading logs into steaming basins for three days. This deices them in the winter and softens the wood fiber. Inside the factory, the steamed logs line up for the debarker-- a machine that removes the bark. The operator projects concentric circles and uses a laser to carefully center the log on the debarker. Positioning is crucial for two reasons-- so that as little wood as possible comes off with the bark and to ensure the debarked log ends up perfectly cylindrical. That maximizes the amount of wood veneer a log will yield. The next step is called rotary cutting. As the log spins, a lathe skims off a sheet of wood veneer just 2/100 of an inch thick. The average log yields 440 linear feet of veneer. Next, they unroll the veneer and cut it into sheets. Then they stack the sheets by identical grain patterns. Using a laser to position the blade, they cut through the stack to take out visual defects. Then they glue the pieces together. To make veneer sheets for the front of the plywood facing, the side that will show, they line up the wood's grain and other features in mirror image. For the back, the side that won't show, they assemble the defective parts they cut out earlier. They use three veneer sheets to make up the plywood door facing. They apply glue to both sides of one sheet, then sandwich it between two other sheets. They feed the three sheets through a hot press at more than 212 degrees fahrenheit. In a minute and a half, the glue cures, and those three sheets of veneer become a 3-ply panel of plywood. Then they sand the panel. Plywood door facings can be made from more than 15 different species of wood from birch and oak to maple and mahogany. At the second factory, they make the core of the door. They glue together strips of wood to form the middle, then frame them with pieces of white pine. A press pushes the core pieces together, then activates the glue, not by heat as most presses do, but by microwaves. Next, they sand and calibrate the core. After the glue machine coats the core, they stick a plywood door facing on each side. They stack a few doors at a time into a cold press for a half-hour. Until the glue dries, then set them aside while the glue cures for another eight hours. Next, they size the width and length to the final dimension, bevel the edges, and cut the exact height of the door. Then they inspect the door on both sides. A machine prepares the door for hinges. Then another machine cuts the hole for the knob. The finishing process takes just 70 seconds per door. One side is sanded, stained, and sealed, then sanded again and varnished. The machine then flips the door over and does the same thing to the other side. The game of paintball is a cross between tag, hide-and-seek, and capture the flag. You try to steal the other team's flag and eliminate your opponents with an air gun that shoots an exploding paint capsule called a paintball. Paintballs are made entirely of nontoxic food-grade ingredients. To make the hollow shell, they first pour water into a giant, heated mixing bowl. They add a sweetener and a secret combination of food ingredients the company won't divulge. Then, finally, the key ingredient that gives the shell its shape-- gelatin-- the kind used to make gummy bears. They melt and mix everything for a half an hour... Then line it up for what they call the drop-- transferring the gel from the mixer into a heated vat called the gel tote. They filter out any globs that didn't melt. Once the gel is securely in the tote, they lower in a giant blender. They pour in food dye and blend for about 20 minutes. Elsewhere in the factory, they use the same method to dye what's called the fill-- the paint that goes inside the shell of the paintball. It's made of polyethylene glycol-- the inert liquid in cough syrup. They thicken it with crayon wax. The gel and fill meet their maker in what's known as the feed room. Here, the vats of gel and fill feed a capsulation machine one floor below. This machine is the same kind used to make bath beads and gelcap medicine. First, the machine spreads out the gel onto a cool drum. This creates a continuous thin sheet of gel called a gel ribbon. This cooling cures the gelatin to the point where it can now be molded into the hollow shell of the ball. The machine presses the gel ribbon into a dye with half-circle pockets, each forming one half of a ball shell. The machine does the next three steps in one shot. It aligns the two half shells together to form a hollow ball, injects the fill, then seals the two half shells together. These newly minted paintballs are still quite soft, though. If they're not dried out, they'll lose their shape, so they fall down onto a conveyor... Then roll into a tumble dryer. From here, they'll go onto a bakery-style rack until they dry out completely. To make dual-colored paintballs, they use the exact same process but feed two colors of gel ribbon into the capsulation machine-- one color for each half of the shell. The finished paintballs go through an automatic counting machine. This one is set to count out and package 200 balls at a time. Manufacturing this messy ammunition is a painstaking process, but well worth the effort to the millions who love the game of paintball. Invented just 15 years ago, it's caught on in more than 40 countries worldwide, and it's not just for kids. More and more companies are booking paintball outings for their employees to help build teamwork. There was a time when our only source of news was the newspaper. Today, though, newspapers have to compete with radio, television, and the internet. Still, to get context and analysis of news events, most still turn to the newspaper. In medieval times, people got the news of the kingdom from the town crier and from official notices posted in public places. By the late 1400s, the first printed news pamphlets appeared in germany. The first english-language newspaper hit the stands in london in 1622. By the 1800s, new printing technology brought the price of newspapers down. This finally made them affordable to the masses, who were becoming more literate. The news editor selects the stories and photographs. They come from the newspaper's own reporters and photographers and from wire services. The news editor accesses the wire services via the internet. Local reporters file their stories to the newsroom computer system. The photo lab scans the photographers' pictures into the system as well. That puts everything at the news editor's fingertips. It's just a matter of moving the various items into the page layout. Once the layout's complete, they group the pages in sets of four called flats. The manager checks each flat for errors, paying special attention to the advertisements, the newspaper's main source of revenue. Next, they prepare the printing plates for each page. A plate is a plastic-coated sheet of aluminum, just 1/100 of an inch thick. It goes into the cylinder of a machine called the imager. The imager's laser beam scans the plate, hardening the plastic coating wherever the computer tells it there will be text or pictures. The coating in the blank areas that don't harden then washes away in a series of chemical baths. It takes about a minute for a plate to pass through those processing basins. Next, a machine punches registration marks on each side of the plate. The press operators will use those marks as a guide to correctly position the plate on the printing press. After they oil the press cylinder, they attach the plates. There's one plate per page per color to a maximum of four colors. The newsprint comes in jumbo rolls weighing about 1,900 pounds apiece. Workers feed several rolls into the reeling machine under the printing press. 2-sided tape connects one roll to the next, ensuring a continuous, uninterrupted run. This is a 4-color printing process. There's a station for each color of ink. The paper passes through each color one at a time like a car going through an automatic car wash. The printing starts out slowly, but within a few seconds revs up to 25 miles per hour. Press operators adjust the colors as needed. Each line of the press prints a 4-page flat. Then it cuts the sheet in half lengthwise, separating two and two. Then it cuts the continuous lengths widthwise into a 2-page spread. Machines automatically assemble the pages in order, then send them off to the shipping department. The stacker makes piles of 50 copies for delivery. Then workers hand-stuff the inserts one by one.