Kon-Tiki itself was made of nine balsa would tree trunks lashed together with hemp rope.

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When David Lowy was 5 years old, his mother bought him a toy glider made from balsa wood.

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Kon-Tiki was the name of the balsa wood raft which was used to cross the Pacific Ocean in 1947 in a journey of 8, 000km (4, 900 miles).

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Each one is handbuilt out of sheets of lightweight balsa wood sandwiched between layers of carbon fiber or Kevlar and baked in an oven at 100C for stiffness.

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The Plastiki's name is wordplay off the "Kon-Tiki, " a balsa raft made famous by Norwegian Thor Heyerdahl, who in 1947 sailed the vessel from Peru to the Polynesian islands.

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Using balsa wood and other materials that would have been available in antiquity, Mr Heyerdahl built the Kon-Tiki, named after a mythical South American king said to have been fleeing for his life, and launched her from Peru.

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In 1948, six Boeing engineers worked for weekend in a hotel room to produce a 33 page proposal, which included moving from turbo-prop to jet engines, and accompanied this proposal with a balsa-model prototype, in order to salvage a team project that was at the risk of failure.

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