Word: rubbers
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...fleet of twelve specially built trucks, each carrying a 30-ft. section of bridge, rolled up to the edge of the swift-running Chattahoochee River, unlimbered their derricks. Men with air compressors inflated the rubber floats, others laid down the steel treadways. In 2 hr. 6 min. the treadways were cleared, an armored column started across. Best time for the old bridge at the same spot...
Colonel Stanley's steel-and-rubber bridge carries a heavier load than old-style pontoons, has fewer parts, packs into five-sixths the space. Its pontoons are inflated to a pressure of only one pound to the square inch, are slow to collapse when punctured...
...rationing of new tires announced by OPA last week was a blessing and a boon to some 4,500 little businessmen. For years the poor relation and black sheep of the U.S. rubber industry, the retreading business has suddenly become the white hope of U.S. car owners...
Taking their ethics from their customers (jalopy dealers care chiefly for looks and price) some retreaders had used inferior rubber, put it on with substandard equipment. Yet they always had an important economic function, too. Fleet owners, taxi and trucking companies know that retreads cost only half as much as new tires (they use only 40% as much rubber) and give 75-80% as much wear. Moreover, a good tire may be renewed more than once. Fleet business had made a few retread concerns profitable long before the war. But war means a boom for all 4,500 of them...
...badly worn, they can be simply recapped: their surface roughened, cement applied, a strip of camelback molded and vulcanized over it. Retreading costs more (about $7 for a 6-by-16 tire, or about half the price of a new tire) than recapping, † and uses more rubber, since the old top rubber, worn too thin for roughening, must be cut and buffed away. The camelback is then applied to the naked carcass. Even for a good retread job the tire must have some rubber...