I decided to try to come up with a way of testing the strength of the two papers. Unfortunately, it took me quite a while to come up with a way of testing it, let alone having numbers to compare. I ended up taking a large container of kitty-litter and setting it on a bathroom scale. The container weight in at 28 pounds. I would now run two tests on each type of paper. First dry, and then wet for 2 seconds. My method of coming up with a comparable number would be to wrap the strip of paper around the handle of the container, pinch the ends together, and lift it up until such time it broke. I would be watching the scale the entire time to see what the weight on it was reduced to before the paper tore. The strips naturally were all cut to the same width, and were the same length... the 8.5" side of a page. A large bucket sitting on top of a weigh scale.
Since it's nigh-impossible to try to lift and take a picture at the same time, the picture to the right is basically just showing how I held the handle with the paper. I started with the dry papers, starting with regular. It did quite well, and held almost until lifting the container off the ground, breaking at just 2 pounds left. Thus, it managed to lift 26 pounds in that manner. With all-weather, it lifted the container entirely off of the scale! I added a hammer and a few other heavy objects, and found that it snapped on me after having lifted 36 pounds. Then came the wet, giving a new set of strips a 2-second soaking. The wet regular paper broke after removing what looked like 1/3 of a pound. The needle on the scale shifted slightly, anyway. The all-weather wet lifted 8 pounds of weight before breaking. A thin strip of paper wrapped around the handle of the bucket and pulling up.
I attempted to find a way to measure how easy the paper could tear, as if one were to tear the side of a page. I don't have any scales of any sort, so I opted for more of a "pass/fail" system. I clamped a pair of locking pliers (about 1/2 a pound) 2 millimeters onto a strip of paper, grasped the paper with my hand one millimeter from the pliers. I then attempted to lift the pliers. Starting with the dry strips, the regular paper tore fairly easily and failed, while the all-weather lifted the pliers and passed. After a 2-second dip in water, the regular paper tore when attempting to attach the pliers, and surprisingly, the all-weather paper still didn't tear. The picture to the right is of the wet all-weather paper lifting the pliers off the ground. Thusly, regular paper failed on both wet and dry, all-weather passed on both. A piece of paper with a vice grip pliers clamped onto it and hanging from it.



The multiple fluids test (part 2) | The paper airplane test


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