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A Foundry in Every Kitchen

Posted by michael on from the we-are-not-responsible-if-you-burn-your-arm-off dept.

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..."

4 of 297 comments (clear)

  1. Clothes Dryer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  2. Photos overexposed by dmiller · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  3. Re:Pizza won't hit 900 Celcius by dragons_flight · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Been there, done that.

    Thankfully it was only somewhat superheated, leading to violent bubbling and some spill over, and not the kind of violent explosion your link suggests is possible.

  4. Using Microwaves to combust Aluminium at 1470 C by cap_pies · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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)