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A Foundry in Every Kitchen
WolfWithoutAClause writes "Bored with making the same old food or
plasma in your microwave? David Reid sounds like he is. He's using his domestic microwave oven to melt iron, silver and bronze! Over 900C! I don't know about you, but I'm going to be checking the temperature of my pizza rather more carefully in future..."
didn't they always tell us not to put metal in the microwave? sparks fly baby!
Try putting in a CD (Yet another use for those AOL 7.0 discs that they keep sending)
:-)
A burned out light-bulb causes some interesting things to happen as well
Jesus used to be my co-pilot, but we crashed in the mountains and I had to eat him.
Kinda puts that rice I made earlier to shame, huh?
I guess this guy fry's the most! hahaha...wow, week old nostalgia sure feels funny.
This is sweet! I could forge my own One True Ring - Deep inside Mount Panasonic, a master ring was made on High-Power to rule them all!
Pizza in the microwave? Yuck!
I don't know about you, but I'm going to be checking the temperature of my pizza rather more carefully in future...
Who in the world microwaves pizza? It gets very soggy and loses almost any redeeming qualities.
This type of thing has been going on for some time for those people interested in making those cute fused glass jewelry pieces. Just build (or buy) the kiln and let the microwave do all the work.
I have been pwned because my
"It must be stated that, at the out-set of these experiments, the researcher was completely ignorant of microwave technology."
Ack, I'm caught between rolling my eyes and saying "Well, a lot of progress is made by people who don't know what they shouldn't be doing."
What the hell, good luck guys. If you plan on reaching 900 degrees, I strongly suggest tearing apart that microwave and rebuilding it out of stuff that can take the heat.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
this is good news for anyone who is into the stolen jewellery business I would guess .. just melt it all down first and noone will ever catch you ..
Now the microwave manufacturers are going to have to add another disclaimer to their liability clause and raise the prices of microwaves ;)
DMCA - Chilling free speech since 1998.
This somehow reminds me of the famous sci-fi book - Fahrenheit 415 - the degree (451) which books burn!! but the story never said anything about microwave melting metal! one thing that was similar to that microwave was the "wall incinerator" in F451. It's a microwaved-sized object in a wall, you can put anything in it and it burns to nothing. I think we'er pretty darn close to that already.. =)
http://www.palmzone.net
Yes, very normal.
As a matter of fact it's highly recommended.
As my father lik@(munch munch)...
Now you can steal gold and silver jewelry and smelt it to some other form within minutes of returning to your evil lair. On the legal side of things, perhaps there will be no more waiting a week for the dentist to make a gold crown. Simply make the ceramic mold, insert gold alloy, microware for a few minutes. Viola, instant gold crown.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
microwaves are high voltage, high current devices. they can kill you EVEN IF THE POWER IS OFF AND THE DEVICE IS UNPLUGGED (ex: by discharging of a large capacitor). Unless you really know what you are doing, don't open one up. i've been trained in servicing electronics, and even i wouln't go near one of these things.
see: Notes on the Troubleshooting and Repair of Microwave Ovens for more information.
When you are cooking pizza in a microwave oven, it won't reach such great temperatures because pizza is not a very efficient absorber of enrgy, newer microwave ovens have sensors inside to prevent the microwave from getting that hot, and if you removed those sensors, by the time the pizza actually got that hot, it would be a nice balck colour. However, when something such as water ( a very efficient absorber of heat is used ) care must be taken to prevent something such as this [abcnews.go.com]. ( Water being superheated then flash boiling when something is placed in it )
And so we go, on with our lives
We know the truth, but prefer lies
Lies are simple, simple is bliss
haha you troll
I saw some comments here about microwaving food like pizza - so i'm gonna post this here once and for all..i wrote this letter to my State Health Department Chair awhile ago, along with a hundred other supporters from my school:
Anthony K. Lam
1826 44th Ave.
San Francisco, CA 94122
April 16, 2002
Health and Human Services Chair Ortiz
State Capitol
California, CA 94122
Dear Health and Human Services Chair Ortiz,
It has been made abundantly clear that the overwhelming majority of Californians do not want microwave ovens - as it can cause serious injuries/deaths and Cancer.
Microwaves quick heating treatment of food substances can lead to uneven and non-calculatable heat distribution in the food - causing so called 'cold spots' and 'hot spots' respectively. Thus germs are often not sufficiently inactivated and eliminated. In tests, histological studies with micro-waved carrots and broccoli, have revealed that the molecular structures of nutrients are deformed by high frequency reversal of polarity, even up to the point of destroying the cell walls, whereas in conventional cooking, the cell structures remain intact.
The anthroposophist A. Bohmert reported the following discovery, that water heated in a microwave oven and other conventional ovens and then left to cool. These water samples were used to bring grain to germination. The grain in contact with micro-waved water, was the only ones that did not germinate. Other scientists have proved that microwaves cause cancer in animals. (Dealler, S.F./Lacey, R.W. (1990) Superficial Microwave Heating. Nature 344: 496.
Motherly instincts are right
Many of us come from a generation where mothers and grandmothers have distrusted the modern "inside out" cooking they claimed was "not suitable" for most foods. My mother refused to even try baking anything in a microwave. She also didn't like the way a cup of coffee tasted when heated in a microwave oven. I have to fully agree and can't argue either fact. Her own common sense and instincts told her that there was no way microwave cooking could be natural nor make foods "taste they way they're supposed to".
Bottom Line:
Micro-waved food causes cancer.
One single meal heated in a microwave oven does not kill us, but after a prolonged intake, such micro waved food will cause so many blockages in the body that it will start to rebel. One day the world will wake up to the fact that microwaves do cause cancer, and even worse than cigarettes.
Micro waved food causes a slow . In the beginning, superficially, we save a little time in heating up our morning coffee in the microwave oven - but the time we save, we are cutting off our own lives. There is no cure in the world to prevent or heal it as long as the cause remains in our homes and we continue to use these devices.
I strongly urge you to ban out microwave oven products.
Sincerely,
all the facts about microwaved ovens and foods can be found here: www.curezone.com
http://www.palmzone.net
This ranks right up there with using liquid oxygen as charcoal lighter. The mpeg is quite impressive, though.
The dogcow says "Moof!"
You should take a stroll in a grocery store one day, and you'll see it. It's in the frozen foods section, and has been sold for more than a decade.
I don't know how microwave ovens work really, but I do know something about waveguides, and how they work - and I think microwave ovens have them inside. I think microwave ovens work around the resonant frequency of water (around 2.4 ghz) - I always thought the food acted as a load to the actual antenna.
If you decreased the load and increased the vswr - by reflecting all that power back with the power levels microwave ovens run at you could be looking at something very dangerous.
well, this is fine indeed. I can finally realize my dream of melting basalt at my house. But now what to do with all those old CDs I was keeping to make a solar oven with?
Info on the elements, OT but close (no bronze or basalt, but iron: http://www.speclab.com/elements/ Has melting points and a lot of other data apparently cribbed from CRC.
P.S. don't forget this
There's nothing wrong with heating up a metal in a microwave, that in itself will not ruin the unit. What is a big problem is the heated item melting the inside floor of the oven due to (drum roll, please), HEAT! The item gets hot, and melts a big hole in the floor, therefore ruining it. So go ahead and heat metals in your microwave, just don't let it touch the insides directly. That means using a plate, cover, etc.
Damn ... now does anyone have an Open-Source ceramic shell slurry mixture?
Karma? Karma? I don't need no stinkin' karma.
You could try reading the article which mentions what happens with a fork and why it doesn't occur with the setup used.
But that would require a brain cell I guess and you don't seem to have one spare.
i need to know these things. what would happen to a coasterized cdr? what happens if i place a glass of water inside and turn it on? will it explode like john stossel of tv's dateline nbc says? will i need a permit to dispose of massive amounts of insects ot will it not require any specialized training? more importaltly, can i free up space under the house and dispose of all those troublesome bodies? seriously. -knowles
-knowles
Back in 1981, I built a small clothes dryer from a microwave. I drilled a hole in the front glass, placed a vacumm tube through it, with a vacumm pump on one side, and a vacumm flask in the m-wave. I them tested various fabrics with differing amounts of H20 in them. Amazing that a jean leg dryed in 15 minutes, tee-shirt in 5, a wool sleve in 25 minutes (low heat to avoid shrinkage). Based on energy calculations, it used about 2/3 the power and was running at lower overall temperatues (I suspected that local temps ran over boiling, but then again they do in a dryer).
I wish I had the money back then to persue the idea.
*assuming* that this technique ultimately becomes stable and useable in a home microwave (safety, cost, repeatability, yada yada), this would open up wonderful avenues -- imagine making your own jewelry and robotics parts without building a blast furnace!
I bet there could also be plastics that would be compatible with this process. Excellent for product prototyping.
The reality, though, is that it'll never be commercialized to the extent of becoming a hobbyist kit. Too bad.
... if the microwave ran cooler (pun intended).
If the microwave could somehow have a thermostatic control, I could take a bag of grade-5 bolts and nuke them to a grade-8 tensile strength. The button for 1040-steel alloy can go next to the popcorn button.
:-)
To properly control the grain structure of the metal, the heating & cooling processes have to be controlled precisely for temperature vs. time (very non-linear and not instinctive). Introduce a quenching process in the microwave, and I bet you could make some serious bucks selling/operating this thing.
The dogcow says "Moof!"
That would lead to one wicked pizza-burn on the roof of your mouth.
Notice how the crucible and insulating assembly looks over exposed in the photos linked from the article. I wonder if this is because they are emitting a large amount of IR? This would be invisible to the eye, but visible to a CCD camera, even through a the cheap plastic filters they use.
My Microwave Ate My Balls! And now I have head cancer!
Anyone else have Microwave Phobia? I sure as hell do...they scare the shit out of me for some reason. I swear i had nightmare one time, where it's the future and everyone was sick from radiation poisoning caused by defective microwaves (GE brand).
Take one green grape (not seedless) and cut it width wise, leaving the skin on one side intact so it forms a sort of hinge. When you lay it in the microwave it should look like a pair of breasts.
Run the microwave for 10-15 seconds. The grape will spark and then burst into flames. Many all-nighters in college were punctuated with breaks to show people this wonderous phenomenon in the dorm microwaves, and now you too can try it at home. yay.
didn't something bad happen when they did this in futurama? or was that only when your in your space ship going warp speed?
members are seeing something, your seeing an ad
Hamsters?? Well that depends upon a number of factors. Power level, position, the ability of the hamster to open the door from the inside. Of course they don't have thumbs, but those little cute... Hmm.. Let us know. Maybe there should be a benchmark on overclockers.com Atomised Hampster Microwave Benchmark 2002 MicrowaveA (Intel) - 127 secs MicrowaveB (AMD) - 115 secs
That's what the microwave at work is for!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
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Snoop Doggy, Do-owww-ohhhh-oggg (Dog)
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Snoop Doggy Dogg, funky as the, the, The D.O.C
Went solo on that ass, but it's still the same
president of nicaragua with atomic terrorism in defense of code 11 secret words somtimes submit susceptibility to the originated undergod of morality islam nuclear airplanes with mohammed in Long Beach is the spot where I served my cane
Follow me, follow me, follow me, follow me, but don't lose your grip
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Cuz I never hesitate to put a nigga on his back
[Yeah, so peep out the manuscript
You see that it's a must we drop gangsta s**t]
What's my motherf**kin name?
Snoop Doggy, Do-owww-ohhhh-oggg (yeah yeah yeah)
Snoop Doggy, Do-owww-ohhhh-oggg (the bomb)
Da-duh-da-da-dah
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Yiggy yes y'allin, Snoop Doggy Dogg in
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Droppin s**t with my nigga Mr Dr. Dre
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And niggaz can't f**k with that
s**t that I drop cuz ya know it don't stop
Mr. One Eight Seven on a motherf**kin cop
Tic toc never the glock just some nuts and a cock
Robbin motherf**kers then I kill dem blood claats
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with the Dogg Pound right behind me
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Da-duh-da-da-dah
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And the Dogg Pound
Snoopy Dogg (the bomb) Snoopy Dogg
Snoopy Dogg (Dog)
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EeeyiyiyiyiyeahtheDoggPound'sinthehou-oww-
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Intersting topic but a bit dangerious. Ok. Very dangerious!!!
:)
Food in a wave get up to a max of around 250 degrees.
You can catch Kellogs Poptars on fire by changing the time from 30 seconds up to 3 minutes
The thing is and sound strange is that food acts as a load for the Magatron generator. That is why you never run the poor thing without somthing in it. If you put metal item it will act more like a short for the magatron and may cause a serious problem like fire, shorts, sparks, etc!
Sounds like a great canidate for a Darwin Award.
now on slightly related topic
When food, (containing water, a very efficient absorber), is placed in a microwave field having a frequency of 2.4 5GHz, virtually all the microwave energy is converted to heat.
Now this raises all sorts of interesting safety questions about wireless networking, as well as the current generation of wireless telephones I see down at Staples, etc.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
You don't melt iron. You melt -steel-, which is an alloy of iron and carbon, with a variable melting point depending on the carbon content(more carbon, lower melting point).
The question about the microwave use is not my issue. ;)
In space, no one can hear you moo.
Other than that, the technique sounds unnecessarily laborious and complex. There are easier ways to melt metal, even at home. Thermite, for example, should appeal to people who like fireworks. Basic textbooks on inorganic chemistry, mineralogy, and metallurgy can tell you how. (Don't people learn this stuff in high school chemistry anymore?)
...you can't tell me what video game you got to try that out in! :-)
"He's using his domestic microwave oven to melt iron, silver and bronze! Over 900C!" Correction: Iron melts at a temperature closer to 1600C
nobody has even "imagined a beowulf cluster of these!" Woo hoo! Frist Psot! ...ok, I'm done. Mod me straight to hell please.
A serious problem with pouring molten metals is the risk of moisture in the moulds. For example, if a fly happened to be in the mould when the metal was poured, the metal would explode from the moisture with enough force to hit the ceiling. I sure don't want to be in a room when its raining molten metal!
Yes, you are right, microwave radiation levels from an oven and the high voltage levels are unhealthy. However these things are usually quite reliable, although there is usually an internal fuse that can blow.
What concerns me more is that the heat build up from a glowing crucible of molten metal is somewhat more than from a pizza. Such heat isn't going to do the cabling or the door much good.
Who needs a blast furnace for making jewelry or robotics parts? Unless, of course, you are making them out of steel and all you have is a bunch of coal or coke and iron ore
would someone please make a 1000 watt wireless radio transmitter.... PLEASE!!
When i used to work as a repair tech for a local clone computer shop, i used to go and grab all the aol disks outta the modem boxes, and nuke em in the back room nuker (5 secs does it nicely), then tack em up on the shop wall. When customers would ask what the hell had happened to the cd's, i said it contained a vicous trojan horse that destroyed your tcp/ip stack (this was back when aol software had a hugely nasty habbit of utterly corrupting your ip stack) and that i was sterilizing the cd so that people didnt accidently destroy their OS. Customers would nod agreeingly afterwards.
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
I mean, this is really cool and all -- but i am sure this is violating an EULA somewhere. ;-) Just be glad that GE is not all up on the M$ behaviors
My life in the land of the rising sun.
I've no quarrel with frozen pizza designed to be microwaved. When hunting and gathering one must accept what one finds. But you savages who defile perfectly excellent cold left over pizza have no place in a civilized society. Some social ills make me wonder what horrible childhood pain would cause a person to behave in such a disturbed manner. But those dysfunctional individuals microwaving delectible left over pizza, clearly they must be shot, incinerated, with their ashes encased in glass rods, buried under a mountain or maybe a salt flat, then covered with lye and never spoken of again.
When people ask "What's this world coming to?" you can be sure that people who microwave perfect precious left over pizza are at fault. Filthy animals!
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
What is poor? I make over 6 figures. There are others who make 30K. It is a matter of who, what, where, and when.
Using an industrial microwave (5kW) with Nitrogen piped through a bed of Al powder I got a max of 1470 C before solid Aluminium Nitrate was formed. Temp possibly got up to 1600 C but thermocouple melted. arse. Seemed that key to getting ignition (or melting) was retaining heat. got one reaction at approx 1KW after 15 mins using carbon powder packed between 2 tubes |c| al |c| |c| al |c| Have u tried Au/Ag powders (heat much faster than solids - sorry if already posted)
...computer moniters can give you cancer, using a 801.222b/a wireless NIC gives you cancer, and living in a concreate house can give you cancer, and drinking soda can give you cancer, oh did I mension that wind gives cancer as well because of Nuclear fallout from testing which is and will be carried around the Earth for thousands of years?
Everything gives cancer. You'll even get cancer if you live in the middle of a fucking forest in a lead house and eat nothing but blueberries (cancer fighting food) all day.
Joe Trailer Park is a proper noun and should be capatilized as such, mother fucker.
As my father lik@(munch munch)...
Microwaves in a microwave oven are using a frequency that matches the vibration frequency of the O-H bond in water. Now if a microwave should be converted into heat, it must hit a molecule, where it can leave the correct energy. This is quantum mechanics, so only the precise amount of energy can be transferred to the vibration. If the wavelength of the microwave doesn't match, energy will not be transferred.
Now the described experiment used several different containers for the metal. These containers absorb the microwave and convert them into heat. To obtain the best container material, you should look for materials whose vibration energy of some of its atom bonding matches that of the O-H bonding in water.
The O-H bond has been chosen as most food contains water. Materials without water will not heat in a microwave oven. (Unless it contains molecules that match the frequency in other ways).
-:) Oh no - not again.
www.rednebula.com
I wonder if this can be used to heat treat all that sapphire/ruby rough I have...
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
What about overclocking the microwave to 3 GHz? That way we can melt 330g sterling silver in less than 14 minutes!
Sometimes I have these ideas...
I had an idea the other week about space stations. Instead of bringing them up piecemeal, take an iron rich asteroid and attach a foundry to it, extruding arc-shaped tubes that could be attached to form a large wheel (of the type seen in 2001, but probably not that large). You would then have a living area made of cast steel - probably a lot stronger and more puncture-proof than anything that could be brought up in the back of a space shuttle. You would just need to bring up interiors and electronics and stuff, to be attached in orbit.
I originally dismissed this out of hand, because you would have to bring a whole foundry up into space - probably heavier than half a dozen space stations.
But then this appears. Could you make a giant microwave? Electricity is easy - just get big solar panels. Are there limitations to the size of a magnetron?
Eh. Probably talking through my arse.
All you need to do is jigger the door safety switches on a Walmart Blue Tag special and learn Morse code. Open and shut the door to send text messages.
I would suggest *not* standing in front of the microwave while doing this.
Oh, you're all geeks.... the lot of you... Not nerds like the site says, GEEKS!
The worst thing about this is that some of you here will actually think this will Get you chicks!
Argh! I need my pills? Where are my pills?
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Errrr, thanks for that, whoever you were. How does a post that hasn't been moderated get moderated down as "overrated"?
Austenite, posting as AC so that people genuinely browsing at 1 don't see this off-topic whine.
Soap works great too. But don't use an entire bar, unless you have a really huge microwave oven...
Yeah, I guess. The only problem is the giant microwave has to be bigger than the asteroid... At which point you might as well just bring a foundry cuz it'd be smaller anyway.
Kinda like needing to power light bulb for when you go camping and deciding to build a nuclear power-plant. Sorta.
Re, Molten metal will burn through unprotected skin....I sure don't want to be in a room when its raining molten metal!
I have seen it happen on a small scale. One day many years ago we young idiots were casting bullets for the long rifle and poured the lead into the mold while it still had a bit of water in it. It exploded out and a drop of it hit my brother's arm. Yes, it did burn right into the flesh, and that was only lead with its front-porch melting point.
If its trajectory had been slightly different it would have hit his eye.
You be careful, now, hear?
Injection molding is more than just the heat, it's the pressure too. Otherwise the polymer molecules don't line up, and you get weak plastics, especially at bends and corners.
so if the metal doesn't heat up, ummmm.... how does it melt???
The inner layers of the mold (including the cup holding the metal stock) contain carbon fibers and ferrite granules, which absorb the microwave and warm up. From there, the heat has to get into the metal by conduction.
Explanation: microwaves are oscillating electrical and magnetic fields, with a wavelength of a few inches. When these hit a good conductor (the metal stock or the walls of the microwave chamber), current flows just under the surface of the metal, generating electromagnetic fields that cancel the incoming microwaves and transmit them back. In other words, the metal reflects the microwaves, and only a tiny percentage of the heat is absorbed by electrical resistance. So you can't melt silver by just putting it in an invisible-to-microwave ceramic crucible and nuking; you need something that absorbs microwaves instead of reflecting. (Food, water, and poodles are all conductive but too high resistance to reflect microwaves well, so they are good absorbers, but make terrible crucibles. 8-) Reid also tried graphite crucibles, but while graphite is higher resistance than metal, it is still not enough resistance for good absorption.
By mixing carbon fiber into ceramics, Reid made a crucible absorb microwaves, but it wouldn't get hot enough - either the carbon fiber isn't a good enough absorber, or it's resistance changes as it heats up until it isn't effective anymore. So he went for another absorbtion mechanism: under the right circumstances the magnetic field of a magnetic material will oscillate in response to an impinging field. This basically requires the atoms to rotate back and forth, and heat is generated in the process. The magnetic field of the material lags behind the impinging field (called "hysteresis"); plotting the impinging and internal field on X and Y axes, the internal field traces out a rough quadrangle instead of a line and the area enclosed = lost energy = heat.
The magnetic ferrite granules Reid used were not good enough absorbers by themselves; I suspect that the material is too magnetically "hard" so it wasn't responding to the microwaves at room temperature. But a layer of carbon fiber/ceramic warmed up the granules, probably making them "softer", and then they absorbed microwaves quite well. Reid found that the maximum temperature was 1100C, enough to melt cast iron, but not steel. (Excessive carbon makes cast iron lower melting but brittle.) He says the ferrite "fluxes" at this temperature - I think that means it melts. At any rate, all magnetic materials will lose their magetism at some temperature.
So it gets hot enough for jewelry work, and maybe a few other things. (See the article for the practical details of building and insulating the crucible/mold.) Could it get hotter with different materials? You need something that remains a good absorber at high temperatures. Maybe a composite of platinum resistance wire alloy fibers in ceramic?
Water evaporates at lower temperature as the atmospheric pressure reduces. You wanna conserve loads of energy? Pump the air out of the dryer and apply a little heat.
Oh shit, patent, patent...
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Try those for your own food. I'd stick with glass and ceramic. The've been tested for centuries.
Doh.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Great idea until the first article of clothing with a zipper or metallic buttons gets fed in...
Still, perhaps a dedicated sock/underwear dryer would be of some use. You could make a very small combination unit that would wash, then dry, and spit them out - you'd only need one pair of socks!! Or at least be able to get a clear pair of socks in about five min if you realized you needed to do the wash the night before.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Who even heats pizza? Either eat it while it's hot, or eat it right out of the fridge. That very versitility is what makes Pizza so wonderful.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Hmmmm
At my university the microwaves in the student accomodation had warnings on them not to dry cloths as they could catch fire.
Dunno if there is any truth in that, but I suppose in a microwave without a turntable (yes, these were cheap micowaves!), localised points could get very hot....
Anyone quoted by a reporter knows how little they understand
Don't believe what you read is the truth.
Now you can make your very own! The old US penny is made of 95% copper, 5% zinc. The new ones are 97.5% zinc, 2.5% copper (the zinc is on the inside, the copper is in a thin outer layer). Zinc melts at significantly lower temps than copper...so scratch a new penny down to the shiny zinc, nuke it in the crucible, and out will flow the molten zinc, leaving a hollow penny!
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
More uses: Drying out silica gel and refreshing zeolites. Says so on the can.
More fun: Microwave grape racing. Steam builds up inside, and jets out the stem hole and the grapes scoot around inside the microwave. Ocasionally, the stem hole is too small/plugged with seeds/still has a piece of stem inside, in which case they explode on the starting line.
Now you can make your very own!
...so scratch a new penny down to the shiny zinc...
:-)
Here's the easy way to do it. Make a tiny scratch in the penny, on the edge or on Lincoln's nose. Drop it into some dilute nitric acid (HNO3). 10 or 20 % should do. Nitric dissolves zinc, but not copper. Soooo, pretty soon, you have yourself a hollow penny. Makes an incredibly cheap, personalized gift if your girlfriend is named Penny. Mine was, and she loved it.
If it's not a matter compiler, I'm not interested. Make your own jewelry? Whoopdey fricken doo. Make anything that'll fit inside a 2' cube? Sign me the hell up.
As a programmer, I've always enjoyed the whole 'tweak a line of code and rebuild' phenomenon... and thought that people who work with real-world matterials kinda got jipped. Then I read Neal Stephenson's "The Diamond Age"... and that was just perfect. Lined up pretty much exactly with a line of reasoning I'd hit upon maybe a month before. Funny how life throws things like that at you from time to time. Yup... all those people who think an intellegence created the universe are just wacky.
Shyeah! And a monkey might fly out of my butt!
Fooz Meister
science is a religion
I think it's more likely that the editors (CmdrTaco et. al.) are doing their invisible moderation. They have already publicly claimed that they have infinite moderation points and they aren't afraid of using them.
I think you are in the wrong in the wrong thread there Dorothy
Well surprise, surprise. This was prettty much our senior project in Ceramic Engineering at the University of Missouri in 1993. We didn't have the expertise to pursue commercialization, so we just left it at that. What's the number of this guy's patent?
What we made was a furnace for less than $500. That's cheap! Just an inexpensive microwave with a thermocouple and furnace controller from Omega. Plugged the microwave into 120 V AC switched by the controller's relay. Our academic department demo'd it for years at conferences.
The chamber was made from hollowed-out pieces of low-density furnace insulation bricks (think of angel food cake's consistency). We lined the inside of the chamber with silicon carbide (mixed with high-T cement). It absorbs strongly in the microwave range, and is cheap. The silicon carbide would get incredibly hot, thus heating the inside of the chamber radiatively. The heating elements self-healed. As they got hot, they would oxidize at the surface to make glass (SiO2), which protected the rest of the silicon carbide from oxidation.
Using an alumina crucible, we were melting copper and glass all over the place. I still have the old prototype, and occasionally amaze friends with some home-cast copper blobs or hand-drwan glass fibers.
BTW, the idea isn't all that new. Microwave processing of materials is widely researched.
Disclaimer: Don't even think of melting copper in your own kitchen, wearing only your bunny slippers and skivs. We were experienced with handling hot stuff. Just don't do anything I've described, okay?, because you will lose an eye.
Cool! How do you recover the zinc? I assume you add a base, and precipitate out the zinc.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Your handy dandy neighborhood 7-11!
;) back then...
Save yourself the trouble of cleanups, repairs and other unwanted distractions from the purity of scientific research.
In high school (20 years ago) we'd torment the various local convenience stores by putting all sorts of interesting things in the microwave then setting it on max time. I'm pretty sure the all-time best results were obtained by a couple of garter snakes. Ahh, if only we'd had digital cameras (well, and the web
Yes. Your clothes will catch on fire.
In a pinch, you can microwave your socks/boxers to kill the little nasties that make them smell funny. Even with a turntable, however, leaving them in for too long *will* result in a fire.
Not that I speak from personal experience or anything. I, uhm, heard this from a friend.
The article mentions using carbon to turn the microwaves into heat. I wonder if this experiment could be combined with the plasma one.
The plasma created using the toothpick and glassbowl method would just be superheated carbon, right? It seems like it would absorb the microwaves more easily because the carbon is so spread out when it's in plasma form.
I'm not exactly sure how the engineering would work but I bet you could use a ceramic dish instead of the glass bowl.
I think it's just that the guy doesn't take good photos.
Even if it was IR, most digital cameras wouldn't have any metering problems anyway.
I have to get up and go pee now.
MOD PARENT UP
is the pirated kind. I've got one which was left with me a while ago. I've never used it (my computer is 100% Slackware) but friends of mine have used it dozens of times.
pickles,
grapes, and uh
fire (creates plasma)
They're all super-cool light effects, good in the dark. The last one is probably better with an older microwave unless you don't mind smoke-flavored food thereafter.
So, how do those radiometers I see at the fair work, Mr Wizard?
Just look up "lost wax casting" or "Investment Casting". Google is your friend, and so are books on jewelry making or foundry practice at your local library or second hand bookshop.