Cross Corrugated Waffle Board

Bimbo Bread Truck

I saw a bread truck the other day. You know the kind: big aluminum-boxed delivery trucks with a full height door that the driver can walk right through. Hostess uses them to deliver Twinkies, Fed-Ex uses them for deliveries. UPS has their very own custom versions. And I got to thinking. It's just a big aluminum box made as simply as possible. The walls are very thin and would need reinforcement in order to remain straight. The aluminum is probably thicker than it needs to be in order to maintain it's shape. They could probably get by with half the aluminum if they used another method of reinforcing. Other methods of reinforcing might cost more than the excess metal they are using now. Honeycomb, for instance, can make really light weight, really strong panels, but I suspect the precision and the glue required, not to mention new fabrication techniques, probably keep it from being used for mundane applications like bread trucks.

And then I thought about corrugated panels. They make corrugated fiberglass panels for roofs for greenhouses and patios. They make corrugated cardboard for boxes. But these only have corrugations running in one direction. They make the panels rigid in the direction of the ridges, but the no so much cross wise.

Corrugated Fiberglass Sheets

How about if we took two corrugated panels and laid one on top of the other cross-wise? If they were firmly fastened to each other, they would be rigid in both directions. Their weak point would be at the fastening where the top of one curve of one panel would meet at right angles with the bottom of the curve of the other panel. There would be a large number of these points, but they would still just be points. Another drawback is that the panel would now be twice as thick.

Okay, here's the big idea. Take one corrugated panel. Make the corrugations gentle so the distance from the crest of one curve to the next is about six inches instead of the two inches you find on fiberglass panels. Now take a second panel and cut it up into little pieces that will sit in the valleys of the first panel. Imagine the two panels lying on the floor, one at right angles to the other. Further, imagine one as the cutter, and the other as the cuttee. The corrugated end of the cutter slides into the cuttee and cuts it into hundreds of identical little pieces. While being cut, the cuttee does not move. Now we have a waffle pattern top and bottom. Weld all the edges of the cut pieces to the cutter piece. Now you have a very rigid panel about an inch thick made of two thin sheets of metal, and no weak points.

Of course cutting, placing, and welding are all going to be a bit tricky, but with laser cutters and robotics, I think you could do it. Problem is, would there be enough demand for such a panel to justify the expense of the fancy equipment? Or could you farm it out to slave labor in China or India? That might be something they could do, metal being more of a precious commodity over there than here.

A word about Bimbo: They had a big bakery around the corner from where I used to work in Beaverton. I mean a BIG bakery. There were always semi-trucks coming and going. About once a week I would see a flour truck show up. It looked like a giant tanker trailer, with triple axles on the rear end. Bimbo must be the biggest company you never heard of. Oroweat is one of their smaller divisions. Funny, I never noticed that Oroweat was missing an 'H'.

View Bimbo Bakery Beaverton Oregon in a larger map

Update November 2016 replaced missing pictures.

Update October 2020 replaced map that I inadvertently deleted. Now I add the blog post URL to the map's description.