It's possible to harvest spider silk to produce cloth?
Answer:
It is possible, but the task is very difficult and labor intensive.
The biggest issue is gathering enough spider silk. Unlike silk worms which can be housed in very dense populations, spiders tend to prey on one another if attempts are made to gather many in one place. This would almost restrict the silk gathering to either very large isolating structures or from spiders in the wild.
The second issue you would need to deal with is that much of the spider silk is covered with additional materials to make them sticky. This would make spinning into some kind of thread almost impossible without coating the silk with a material like diatomaceous earth or treating it with a solvent to remove these materials. Either way, this would tend to lessen the overall strength of the threads.
The final issue is the strength and rarity of the spider silk means that you would want to use the smallest diameter thread possible. This would mean having over 1000 threads per inch (and this could be very much higher in number). This might push the limits of most looms.
Artificial spider silk has been investigated as fibers for cloth. It seems to have properties similar to Kevlar.
Better harvest silk worms.
Not only is it possible, spider silk is very strong and interesting material!
Check out some sites:
http://www.discovery.com/cgi-bin/convers...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/spider_silk...
http://www.xs4all.nl/~ednieuw/spiders/in...
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0826/p13s0...
Yes.
Yes. It is possible. However, the manufacturers don't get along very well. Different species produce webbing with unique characteristics. Some is stronger than our strongest man-made thread.
The solution is to engineer the silk, in order to eliminate the arachnids from the production process.
Apparently, break times were murder.
You can harvest spider silk but time is your enemy. How long do you have, how many spiders do you have? If you raise them you must feed them. I believe that work is going on to put spider gene splices into goats, the resulting milk from the goat has spider silk components to be used for production of specialty items, very strong and light materials.
As far as I know, spider silk can already be synthesized. So, harvesting it may not be useful at all.
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