Originally Posted by
BlueMoon
The coeffeicent of friction doesn't have to be very high when your talking about 20,000 pounds.
Looking at a couple of websites, the Co-efficient of friction for steel on steel lubricated is around .15 (
http://www.carbidedepot.com/formulas...icient.htm)for about 20k pounds that would take about 3000pounds of force to break it free. given about a 3 foot door handle (a lever) it would take possible 1000 pounds exerted by the FA to pull the handle.
I'm sure as hell not going to go and try it, but I still think it isn't very easily done.
Hard steel is less than .10, maybe half that. I don't know, but I'm assuming that those pins are not mild steel or iron.
The linear calculation applies to two flat surfaces with all force applied perpendicular. Since the pins and their holes are cyclindical, the math would be different (I'm not doing calculus on saturday
). But I wouldn't want to try it either.