cds, toothpicks, light bulbs, tinfoil, florescent bulbs, christmas tree ornaments, soap and grapes– all things that can potentially be put in a microwave.
5 thoughts on “Microwave Hacks: Fun With Microwaves”
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The coolest microwave use I’ve seen was when Popular Sciences H2.O published, a few months back, instuctions for melting and casting pewter all from your home microwave.
What fun!
just checked the links, and they have a link to some microwave experiments i had done as an undergraduate with former colleagues of mine. just look for “Physics inside a Microwave Oven” under “More Experiments”. the videos show plasma balls emanating from a specially cut grape. funny story about the way the grape was cut: when we were trying these experiments out, we initially cut the grapes lengthwise in half, but leaving a bit of skin to hold them together. it gave nominal results. as the day went on, we started running out of grapes. to stretch our grape supply, i started cutting the grape halves in half, with the skin still connecting the two halves. and that worked very well; getting the grape down to that size works well (close to 1/4 wavelength) as a dipole antenna for the microwaves.
matt, I would love more info on the PS h2.0 for pewter and casting! I’ve been looking for a good way to do this for some minatures for some time and never seen this… I’m intreged!
I’ve never see the cd crack like that in the microwave… But I do have my old CD shatter from inside the CD-ROM… It’s spin real fast and it shatter… I’m amaze how any cd can DESTORY!… I’m looking for a “HOW TO DESTORY CD” for any case if i need to destory the information… lol… Most case happen in school, does not want to get busted… Destory the cd! in the better way… Not just breaking into two… Perhap speed up the cd-rom if you got a program in the floppy to do that…
Anyway… Keep on the GOOD hack!
Deaf
A certain inverter-based microwave oven can be used for RTILs – ionic liquids. I need to ‘roll my own’ at home for a low viscousity, short side chain liquid using silyls instead of alkyls. Nothing on the market does that. So I DIY.