Week 2 Lab: Flute Selection Lab

Measure the flute on your own package and put a real cost-and-protection trade-off behind last week's guess

1 March 2027

Before the lab#

Bring back the package from week 1’s teardown. If it’s recycled already, any corrugated box will do — the point is measuring a real one, not a diagram.

In the lab#

• Measuring flutes — cut a cross-section (or find an existing tear) and count flute peaks against a ruler over one inch. Match your count against the reference numbers from Monday’s lecture (A ≈ 33/ft, B ≈ 47/ft, C ≈ 39/ft, E ≈ 90/ft) to identify what you’re holding.
• Costing the choice — for this exercise, work from an illustrative example figure, not a real quoted price: assume a hypothetical per-sheet cost difference of $0.03 between B-flute and E-flute stock at the quantities a small retailer orders. Using that assumption, estimate roughly how much flute choice alone adds to the cost of a package, and whether that number is large enough to explain why a retailer would care.
• Failure cases — as a group, name a real product category where the flute in your hand would fail in transit (too thin for the weight or fragility) and one where it would be needless overkill (too thick for what’s inside).

Afterwards#

Keep your flute identification and your cost estimate. Week 3 asks what “survives transit” is actually tested against, which is the other half of the trade-off this lab only estimated.