As a boy-scientist
I ran through the conventional conker-toughening techniques very quickly, and discovered that they were no good.

Oven-curing made them extremely hard, but very brittle, whereas pickling resulted in rubbery conkers (smirk) which were useless for destroying others, and just split slowly.

I found that long-term air drying worked well - the previous season's nuts were better than fresh ones.

But then, as my knowledge of materials science blossomed....yes, you're quite right, my friends wouldn't play conkers with me any more :(
( K2k6 has a proper job these days, Fri 19 Sep 2008, 12:24, Reply)