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From: ian field on 29 Jul 2010 10:23 <spike1(a)freenet.co.uk> wrote in message news:t408i7-ue8.ln1(a)librarian.sky.com... > And verily, didst ian field <gangprobing.alien(a)ntlworld.com> hastily > babble thusly: >> That may have been a reference to NASA spending $millions designing a >> ball >> point pen, only to find it still didn't work in zero gravity - the >> allegedly >> bacward Russians used pencils and didn't have any problem. > > Urban myth trounced by Qi. > Pencils are dangerous in space, graphite granuels floating around willy > nilly getting into the electronics and shorting things out... Pencil graphite is actually a fair proportion of clay depending on how hard the 'lead' is specified to be - of course if graphite dust is that much of a problem they could always revert to ye olde actual lead pencil. Not exactly graphite and not exactly electronics, but when I serviced the starter on the CBX550, the end cap was full of 28 years of compacted brushes dust - I'm amazed it didn't pack up sooner or maybe even catch fire. The commutator wasn't pretty either. |