Dumb / Fun electrical stuff you did as a kid.

[digsys]

All the talk of microwaving stuff seemed so interesting, so this morning i went the cheap shop and bought a $25 microwave, the first and last thing i microwaved was a full beer bottle.

... and ? You just can't leave it at that ...

[peter.mitchell]

well, there wasn't much left, it took about 14min~ to blow, but when it did the microwaves u shaped piece of sheet metal cover was a rounded u, in the opposite direction, the door was no where to be found and for some reason it tripped the breaker in the power board i had it plugged into.

[Alana]

My earliest childhood adventure with electricity was to go into bundle of wires my folks used as extension cords and get electricuted. I was no older than 4.

This tought me a lesson that lasted until i was about 10.
Then i started playing around - making electrocal detonators for fireworks out of xmas light blubs, blowing up electrolitics or charging them up to 200-300 volts with inverter and then discharging on a metal school bench or some poor child hand. Once i even dared to discharge 300V 800uF cap during class test. And there was some chemistry experiments mostly involving potasium nitrade and shugar but not only. There is a cool trick to show to your friends involving starting a fire with a drop of water but without using metalic sodium or potassium

[tesla500]

My favorite way of scrapping microwaves: Sealed Kahlua bottle full of water. Probably similar to peter.mitchell's beer bottle. High speed video included! Don't try this at home kids!


I want to try this again but with popcorn in the bottle with the water.

[SeanB]

Normally I just take them apart, keeping the magnetron and the capacitor and diode if still good. Rest goes as scrap meta, and is about $15 at the scrapyard. If I cut the copper out I will get $25. Worth it especially if I accumulate more scrap metal in the cavity before going, then I have a convenient carry bucket that does not need to come back.

[Sionyn]

the stories in this thread are awesome
i came across this story this morning this must be dumbest generation ever Justin Bieber fans tricked to cut them selves because he smoked some weed 
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2258778/Cut-Bieber-Miley-Cyrus-weighs-sick-Twitter-trend.html

[Nirios]

When I was very young, around 8-9, I found a trolling motor in a trash pile on the side of the road.  It had nice big alligator clips on it so I thought I would try to run it by clamping it to the house wiring in the junction box on the side of my house.  I remember the prop turned a few times, hummed really loud, and then I got scared when smoke and flame came out of the motor.  Thinking back, I pulled the wires out of the junction box and removed the wire nuts all without turning the power off.  Amazingly, the fire did not cause the breakers to trip, which at that time I knew nothing about.

Around the same age, a friend and I had a FM/AM/Weather radio with a manual tuner and external antenna.  For whatever reason we figured that if the extended antenna would receive a station then a really, really long one would do even better.  We set the radio on the floor and proceeded to connect every metal object we could find to the antenna.  We used aluminum foil to wrap the edges were to objects connected.  I remember the antenna length ended up wrapping around the entire room.  When we turned the radio on and tuned it to the lowest frequency (this radio allowed below 87.8 by just keep turning the knob past the "stop") strange sounds were heard and then a few seconds later the power in the house went out.  I remember it was the whole house cause we interrupted my dad watching a game on the TV.  I am still not sure why that "experiment" tripped the 150A main breaker.

[TerraHertz]

<microwave KABOOM video>

That's really excellent! The spray of sparks in the slo-mo were a very nice touch, bonus points for numerous fragments embedded in surroundings, and wrecking your nice long bar G-clamps in the name of LOLs was really going the extra mile.
 Five stars!

You know, if you used several bottles packed in there at once, you could probably take your garage door out too.

[westfw]

So in the microwave oven the eggs just sit there, getting hotter and hotter. They get to over the boiling point of water, with the pressure going up and up and still they don't explode. Then one of them does. This detonates all the others.

Well, yes.  And this is about the same thing that happens on the regular stove.  Judging by the pieces of egg that were on the ceiling...

(No, I'm not going to try it again to see if the same thing happens.)

(BTW, our microwave broke this NYE, about 2 hours before our very food-centric NYE party started.  The magnetron started arcing over, and the whole thing sounded like a Jacob's Ladder.  Very impressive!  I didn't DO anything to it; I swear.  But I had fun showing it off to other engineering-minded folk throughout the party...)  (Thanks be that it's possible to go out 2 hours before a NYE party and buy a new microwave.  Twice (when the first doesn't fit.))

[SeanB]

If I were to do that I would use a PET bottle and wire the top on with a lot of wire. they have a much higher bursting pressure, possible it will get to 130C before the blast.

[Ferroto]

I once shorted a lithium laptop battery. Didn't explode like I hoped it just burned white hot.

[TerraHertz]

Not sure if it's worth resurrecting this thread for, but since microwave ovens featured so highly, here's something related:


Microwave Warfare - Barrie Trower

Cue everyone with Normalcy Bias yelling 'oh it can't be so!' plus the inevitable tin foil hat jokes.

Definitely time to start a thread here on Smart Meters. I really must find re-find that video where someone is walking an RF field strength meter around near a Smart Meter, with the RF envelope output as audio. Since we're speaking of microwave pulse rates, and how specific pulse rates have specific physiological and psychological effects.

Then I'd like to hear someone explain why a wireless mesh-network node such as a smart meter, would be continually linear-sweeping its transmit pulse rate across a wide range, from under one pulse a second to several hundred pulses a second. As it clearly is in that video.
And it would be very interesting to see if there's a way the operators of a future ubiquitous Smart Meter mesh network, could manage to control and synchronize the transmit pulse rate of all the nodes in the network.

Because, gee, if you could do that, and by some pretext every home had been forced to install Smart Meters, you could send an entire city (or country) literally insane quite quickly. Or just kill them all.

[AlfBaz]

Can we get this as an emoticon