Hi All,
I was in Mums back garden this morning and there was the most amazing feat of engineering on display in the form of a spiders web. ;-)
It had about a 1m horizontal span on the top guys and about .5m down to a plant at the bottom. If you examined the anchor points closely they were multiplied over maybe 2 or 3 points. The 'web' itself was very concentric, about 30 cm diameter but the actual circles were no more than 2mm apart (nothing was getting past this baby!).
The builder ( brown / white and about 1" long) was sat in the middle waiting for his breakfast ;-)
It semms a shame that although very strong (in a materials sense) it is very weak and be so easily wrecked by us just brushing past (all that effort and no breakfast) ;-(
Is the spider the ultimate d-i-yer? (how many of us could build something that large and that quickly without a crane!) ;-)
(waits for Mary with stories of Bees putting up her shed) ;-)
All the best ..
T i m