Hacking Fake Food

August 8, 2023 by Al Williams 24 Comments

Ever seen a restaurant where they display fake models of the food on the menu? We never thought much about how shokuhin sampuru — the Japanese name — were made until we watched [Process X]’s video showing a 71-year-old artist creating food models. We aren’t sure what we — or you — would do with this information, but it is a striking process, and there must be something you could do with it. We suggest turning on the English captions, but you’d probably enjoy watching the unusual craftsmanship even with no words.

In years past, the food models were primarily made from wax, but since the 1980s, it is more common to use polyvinyl chloride, silicone, and resin. While some factories produce items, sometimes with a mold, single craftsmen like the one in the video still make up the largest part of the market.

We aren’t sure, but we think the material in the video is wax. We couldn’t help but think that some of this could have been 3D printed, but even with the finest resins and resolution, it probably wouldn’t be quite as artistic. We think wax is mainly underutilized in today’s tech. But there are some places it still shows up.

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Piezo Pickup Makes Wax Records Easy To Digitize

June 23, 2021 by Dan Maloney 27 Comments

Sound recording and playback have come a long way in the last century or so, but it’s fair to say there’s still a lot of interesting stuff locked away on old recordings. Not having a way to play it back is partly to blame; finding an antique phonograph that plays old-timey cylinder recordings is pretty hard. But even then, how do you digitize the output of these fragile, scratchy old recordings?

As it happens, [Jan Derogee] is in a position to answer these questions, with an antique phonograph and a bunch of Edison-style wax cylinders with voices and music from a bygone era locked away on them. It would be easy enough to just use the “reproducer” he previously built and set up a microphone to record the sound directly from the phonograph’s trumpet, but [Jan] decided to engineer a better solution. By adding the piezo element from an electronic greeting card to his reproducer, potted with liberal quantities of epoxy and padded with cotton, the piezo pickup was attached to the phonograph arm in place of the original stylus and trumpet. The signal from the piezo element was strong enough to require a shunt resistor, allowing it to be plugged directly into the audio input jack on a computer. From there it’s just an Audacity exercise, plus dealing with the occasional skipped groove.

We appreciate [Jan]’s effort to preserve these recordings, as well as the chance to hear some voices from the past. We’re actually surprised the recording sound as good as they do after all this time — they must have been well cared for.

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Reviving Old Recipe For Faraday Wax Keeps Vacuum Experiments Going

May 29, 2021 by Dan Maloney 24 Comments

Science today seems to be dominated by big budgets and exotics supplies and materials, the likes of which the home gamer has trouble procuring. But back in the day, science was once done very much by the seats of the pants, using whatever was available for the job. And as it turns out, some of the materials the old-timers used are actually still pretty useful.

An example of this is a homemade version of “Faraday Wax”, which [ChristofferB] is using for his high vacuum experiments. As you can imagine, getting a tight seal on fittings is critical to maintaining a vacuum, a job that’s usually left to expensive synthetic epoxy compounds. Realizing that a lot of scientific progress was made well before these compounds were commercially available, [ChristofferB] trolled through old scientific literature to find out how it used to be done.

This led to a recipe for “Faraday Wax”, first described by the great scientist himself in 1827. The ingredients seem a little archaic, but are actually pretty easy to source. Beeswax is easy to come by; the primary ingredient, “colophony”, is really just rosin, pretty much the same kind used as solder flux; and “Venetian red” is a natural pigment made from clay and iron oxide that can be had from art suppliers. Melted and blended together, [ChristofferB] poured it out onto wax paper to make thin strips that are easily melted onto joints in vacuum systems, and reports are that the stuff works well, even down to 10^-7 mbar.

We love this one — it’s the perfect example of the hacker credo, which has been driving progress for centuries. It also reminds us of some of the work by [Simplifier], who looks for similar old-time recipes to push his work in DIY semiconductors and backyard inductors forward.

[David Gustafik] dropped us the tip on this one. Thanks!

Homemade Capacitors Of A Mad Scientist

October 3, 2016 by Steven Dufresne 26 Comments

Once upon a time I was a real mad scientist. I was into non-conventional propulsion with the idea of somehow interacting with the quantum vacuum fluctuations, the zero point energy field. I was into it despite having only a vague understanding of what that was and without regard for how unlikely or impossible anyone said it was to interact with on a macro scale. But we all had to come from somewhere, and that was my introduction to the world of high voltages and homemade capacitors.

And along the way I made some pretty interesting, or different, capacitors which I’ll talk about here.

Large Wax Cylindrical Capacitor

As the photos show, this capacitor is fairly large, appearing like a thick chunk of paraffin wax sandwiched between two wood disks. Inside, the lead wires go to two aluminum flashing disks that are the capacitor plates spaced 2.5cm (1 inch) apart. But in between them the dielectric consists of seven more aluminum flashing disks separated by plain cotton sheets immersed in more paraffin wax. See, I told you these capacitors were different.

Big wax cylindrical capacitor

Exposed wax of the capacitor

The experiment and the capacitor’s interior

I won’t go into the reasoning behind the construction — it was all shot-in-the-dark ideas, backed by hope, unicorn hairs, and practically no theory. The interesting thing here was the experiment itself. It worked!

I sat the capacitor on top of a tall 4″ diameter ABS pipe which in turn sat on a digital scale on the floor. High voltage in the tens of kilovolts was put across the capacitor through thickly insulated wires. The power supply contained a flyback transformer and Cockcroft-Walton voltage multiplier at the HV side. As I dialed up the voltage, the scale showed a reducing weight. I had weight-loss!

But after a few hours of reversing polarities and flipping the capacitor the other way around and taking plenty of notes, I found the cause. The weight-loss happened only when the feed wires were oriented with the top one feeding downward as shown in the diagram, but there was no weight change when the top wire was oriented horizontally. I’d seen high voltage wires moving before and here it was again, producing what looked like weight-loss on the scale.

But that’s only one of the interesting capacitors I’ve made. After the break we get into gravitators, polysulfide and even barium titanate.

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Metal Casting With Single Shelled PLA Masters

July 20, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 21 Comments

[3DTOPO] does a lot of metal casting (video link, embedded below). That’s obvious by the full and appropriate set of safety gear, a rarity on YouTube.

They had all the equipment to do it the normal way: craft or CNC out a master, produce a drag and a copy, make any necessary cores, and finally; pour the mold. This is a long and tedious process. It has a high rate of error, and there is a parting line.

Another set of methods are the lost ones. With these methods the master is produced out of a material like foam or wax. The master is surrounded by refractory and then melted, burned, or baked out of the mold. Finally the metal is poured in. Theoretically, a perfect reproduction is made without ever having to open the mold.
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Wrangling High Voltage

June 15, 2016 by Steven Dufresne 28 Comments

Working with high voltage is like working with high pressure plumbing. You can spring a leak in your plumbing, and of course you fix it. And now that you’ve fixed that leak, you’re able to increase the pressure still more, and sometimes another leak occurs. I’ve had these same experiences but with high voltage wiring. At a high enough voltage, around 30kV or higher, the leak manifests itself as a hissing sound and a corona that appears as a bluish glow of excited ions spraying from the leak. Try to dial up the voltage and the hiss turns into a shriek.

Why do leaks occur in high voltage? I’ve found that the best way to visualize the reason is by visualizing electric fields. Electric fields exist between positive and negative charges and can be pictured as electric field lines (illustrated below on the left.) The denser the electric field lines, the stronger the electric field.

Weak and strong electric fields

Ionization in electric fields

The stronger electric fields are where ionization of the air occurs. As illustrated in the “collision” example on the right above, ionization can happen by a negatively charged electron leaving the electrically conductive surface, which can be a wire or a part of the device, and colliding with a nearby neutral atom turning it into an ion. The collision can result in the electron attaching to the atom, turning the atom into a negatively charged ion, or the collision can knock another electron from the atom, turning the atom into a positively charged ion. In the “stripping off” example illustrated above, the strong electric field can affect things more directly by stripping an electron from the neutral atom, again turning it into a positive ion. And there are other effects as well such as electron avalanches and the photoelectric effect.

In either case, we wanted to keep those electrons in the electrically conductive wires or other surfaces and their loss constitutes a leak in a very real way.

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New CNC Machine? DIY Machinable Wax!

June 11, 2016 by Jenny List 25 Comments

The folks at Leeds Hackspace have built themselves a shiny new C-beam based CNC mill. As you might expect everyone wants to try the machine out, but there’s a problem. A CNC machine presents a steep learning curve, and a lot of raw materials (not to mention cutting bits) can be used in a very short time. Their solution is simple: mix themselves some machinable wax from LDPE pellets and paraffin wax, then easily recycle their swarf and failed objects back into fresh machinable wax stock.

Making the wax recipe is not for the faint-hearted, and involves melting the LDPE pellets and wax to 130 degrees Celcius in a cheap deep-fat fryer. They bought the cheapest fryer they could find at the British catalogue retailer Argos, you really wouldn’t want to risk an appliance you cared about in this exercise.

Colouring came from an orange wax crayon, though they note recycling of mixed colours will inevitably result in a muddy brown. The finished mixture was poured into Tupperware lunchboxes to set, and the resulting blocks were trimmed to square on a bandsaw. The Tupperware proved not to have a flat bottom, so later batches were cast in a loaf tin which proved much more suitable.

We’ve mentioned the machinable wax recipe before here at Hackaday, but it’s worth returning to the topic here with a description of it being used in the wild. Having watched other environments get through learning materials at an alarming rate with very little to show for their effort, we can see it makes a lot of sense as a training material.