Wielding the power to melt glass or instantly ignite most day to day materials can be intoxicating pretty fun. With a little math, a lot of patience, and 5,800 1cm pieces of mirror, this build requires welding glasses just to look at the 1-2cm focal point. With an idea rumored to date back to Archimedes, this more portable parabolic project is perfect for your home burning needs. Unfortunately, this setup seems to have burnt itself to death at some point, though that makes room for version two, which will reportedly bump the mirror count to 32,000 or so.
There are plenty of other ways to make a death ray out there as well, including using lasers or lenses. Think you have a better tool of destruction? Be sure to tell us about it.
this thing is crazy, i dont beleave it works. the myth busters did this and didnot work well at long distances but it worked on closes distances.
Somebody send this to Mythbusters :))
Such and elegantly simple solution. Now do this with one of the big old 8′ to 10′ satellite dishes from the ’90s.
good grief, man! I appreciate the effort this guy spent gluing all those mirrors, but all he had to do was get a wooden hoop, soak it in water and bend it to the outer shape you wanted. When it dries, attach a Mylar sheet to it, seal well, and seal the back. Apply a vacuum to the assembly and the Mylar will form a smooth curve. I’m willing to bet it will reflect light better too, but I suppose I am missing the point of using the massive amount of mirrors. I did solder my own LED matrix using 1536 LEDs after all…
if you can’t find a regular sheet of mylar, get a solar blanket. same stuff.
Maybe it would be easier to polish the dish itself rather than glue down thousands of mirrors?
My kids and I have been having fun with the 11″-square fresnel lens I got from from Edmund Scientific :^)
not that elegant. surely there’s a better way to put a mirror surface onto a dish? he’s got to be losing 10-20% of focal strength to chinks and errors.
Now let’s see what kind of range he can get with it. Anyone tried making one with an adjustable focal length?
Alex: i was thinking the same thing, but then i just lost interest. Those idiots over at mythbusters do everything so half arsed that i stopped watching long ago.
remember kids the mythbusters couldn’t do this so it must be a fake.
Yeah, well :)) That’s why I said someone should send it to them. To show them that you don’t need the president and 300 men to replicate Archimedes’ experiment (and fail at it).
Alex: They prefer to be called “Chinese Americans”
@Aleks Clark: The preferred nomenclature is “Chinese Americans”
“I’m not talking about a guy who built the fuc*ing railroads here.. Walter he peed on my rug!
I wonder how that shed caught fire…
Did you try cooking with it ?
Nice experiment. Wait for next one.
IT’s easier to do with a large old dish, some silver paint, clear paint, sandpaper and polish.
Paint it silver, then clear, then wetsand with 800 grit, 1000 grit and then 2000 grit. Polish with car rubbing compound.
DO this to a 10′ old aluminum dish and you get a killer solar deathray with a focal point hot enough to melt salt.
I second the MythBusters comment. I’m always surprised that something is deemed impossible if two people with communications degrees cannot manufacture it on a $50 budget in a day.
I too stopped watching long ago.
a vid of a similar project but a bit bigger.
and is actually melting steel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJot9WKybQE
http://www.cockeyed.com/incredible/solardish/dish01.shtml
@Jakezilla,
That “light sharpener” made with a huge C-band is exactly what this made me recall. It is orders of magnitude bigger in area than the little “death ray” on this post…
First… Does anyone think it’s kinda dumb he’s not wearing protective gloves in that video???
Second… I think it’s kinda funny that MythBusters failed at this not just once, but twice.. the episode featuring Obama they went back and tried it again…. Someone should seriously send them this I wanna see them burn a boat
@m42d: that is one of the coolest things i’ve ever seen.
Wouldn’t a Heliostat power generating station be a hint to Mythbusters that it CAN be done? Just apparently not by them…
Don’t they make telescopes like this to avoid having to use huge pieces of glass? I wonder if it would be possible to get any (presumably poor quality) images from a mirror like this in a telescope configuration with a secondary and an eyepiece.
Just imagine an entire superbowl stadium, filled to capacity – except on “FREE Blackeyed peas CD day”.
Imagine a bright sunny day and a retracted roof in Arlington, Texas.
Imagine a lame halftime superbowl show spiced up with a short instructional video on how to aim and use a CD as a signal mirror…
Me, I’d use a fresnel lense from a rear projection TV. Gluing thousands of mirrors might be fun to some, but I’ve got better things to do.
I think the Mythbusters know it can be done theoretically. The point was the difficulty in getting a bunch of humans to reflect sunlight at the same point.
Mythbusters was testing to see if the method of using shield sized reflectors controlled by people would work, not if you can make hot with light. Two very different tests.
@Guy, adjusting the focal length means changing parameters of the parabola… not impossible but probably not feasible without driving it with a controller.
Sure anyone cn harp on a death ray, but how many actually tried building one? Its plain awesome.
http://amazing-space.stsci.edu/resources/explorations/groundup/lesson/basics/g51/
Soooo, they already do this kind of things to look into the deepest parts of the universe just on a much bigger scale.
@boricuagnu
Based on?…..
Did you see that the samples were held close to the device? This type of device has done a number of times. Easier to be a troll then a maker I guess.
Mythbusters are not scientists but special effects guys.
They failed miserably when trying to cook a chicken on a low power microwave site.
“If” they had done the same experiment on the output of a kilowatt level waveguide on an active military radar transmitter, that chicken would’ve been ready to have for lunch!
@Matthew
As pointed out before, if you use a ring and a vacuum with reflective material (mylar) you could feasibly change the diameter of the ring…. which should change focal length if vacuum pulls the same.
Ooh.. An inside out disco ball!
It is quicker to use aluminum paint on your primestar dish, unless you are making a fashion statement with that disco ball look. Even quicker to stick some aluminum foil on the dish.
lol @ the people dissing mythbusters.
Its a kids science show, dont expect pure science in a show that has to keep people entertained and the show simple in a limited budget and timeframe.
Aim, hypothesis, procedure, results, conslusion. Don’t expect anything else.
@spork
All you need to do to change the focal length is vary the vacuum. No need to vary the hoop.
@all suggesting paint etc.
Efficiency will be no where near that of mylar or glass mirror (particularly first surface mirror).
The key point to what mythbusters was trying to accomplish was using the tools and technology of the period. You don’t really think they would have failed using current tech. do you?
Also, if you look in the video at 22 seconds in, you can see he’s using second surface surface mirrors. This same project using first surface mirrors would have dramatically better results. Looks like those little mirror squares you get at the craft store. Then again most people couldn’t make it for 90$ with first surface mirrors. Alas, kudos to the maker. I stare at rolls and rolls of mylar mirror material, and large first surface mirrors all day at work and have no motivation to do this. Of course, once you hold a 3 ft by 4 ft fresnel lense in the air and watch concrete pop away like popcorn and burn through the side of steel buckets or melt extruded aluminum it just seems like way too much work. Lol
Put a lens at/near the focal point to create a straight beam of light.
@all: 2 reasons why mythbusters failed.
1.What mythbusters were trying to do was see if in Archimedes day this could be done. What they tried was 2 different ways to ignite a moving target on water. Not to ignite a chunk of dry wood at 2 feet.
2.If they had been using modern tech they would have succeeded.
I would have made the light from 50 of these run into another parabolic reflector, then into a fresnel lens, then into an optical fiber that could be fed into a gun frame. Not very mobile mind you but effective.
I can’t think of a better fate for many disco balls – good build (and the claims of obliteration are pretty good too). Wouldn’t it be a “Death Focal Point” rather than death ray, though?
You can order Parabolic mirrors online easy enough too.
I agree w/ Rob Wentworth’s suggestion of using aluminum foil on the dish. What’s even easier is to put the foil on a wok & make it portable also. I use my wok w/ a PC mic as a parabolic sound dish. All I need to do is to put the al foil on it and replace the mic w/ whatever I want to burn. Just make sure I clean up the wok before my wife kills me. ;-) After all, this is just basic high school physics. The energy at the focal point is proportion to to the square of the dish diameter to focal area dia. ratio. So like they say, the bigger the better.
I think the whole point of this “hack” is the teenager is utilizing what he learnt and apply it other than just sitting in front of the TV/PC playing mindless games all day. After all, this is how all great minds begin. Good job kid!
@Mojoe many mirrors are just a bit of cheap paint-stripper away from being first-surface.
I’ve been wanting to do this for some time now as a solar energy collector. I’m not set up to make a Stirling engine, but I have a few small IC engines that could be converted to passable steam-engines. Just one of hundreds of things I’ll probably never get around to…
Awesome work. I cant help but think he succeeded where mythbusters and MIT failed. But i suppose we need to be fair to MIT and Mythbusters, they were trying to aim the focal point further out but still.
76^2=5800 then it’s 76x76cm2 square .
1m2 can get 1kw so you’re dish can get <760watts?
Finally an eco-death ray
Las Vegas Death Ray
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1315978/Las-Vegas-hotel-death-ray-leaves-guests-severe-burns.html
Nice work!
I imagine a smaller dish and a peltier in the focal point to generate some watts (before melt it down:))
That photo makes me laugh. Reminds me of my son setting fire to the grass in the back yard with a giant mirror last summer!