Ochroma 5th and 6th generations of the Chevrolet Corvette had floor pans composed of balsa sandwiched between sheets of carbon fiber reinforced plastic. Norwegian scientist and adventurer Thor Heyerdahl, convinced that early contact between the peoples of South America and Polynesia was possible, built the raft "Kon Tiki" from balsa logs, and upon it he and his crew sailed the Pacific Ocean from Peru to the Polynesian Tuamotu Archipelago in 1947. However, the Kon Tiki logs were not seasoned and owed much of their (rather slight) buoyancy to the fact that their sap was of lower density than seawater. This serendipitously
Kon-Tiki expedition Raft Across the South Seas", later reprinted as "Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific in a Raft". It appeared with great success in English in 1950, also in many other languages. A documentary motion picture about the expedition, also called "Kon-Tiki", was produced from a write-up and expansion of the crew's filmstrip notes and won an Academy Award in 1951. It was directed by Thor Heyerdahl and edited by Olle Nordemar. The voyage was also chronicled in the documentary TV-series "The Kon-Tiki Man: The Life and Adventures of Thor Heyerdahl", directed by Bengt Jonson. The original "Kon-Tiki" raft is now on display