Category Archives: microwave oven transformer

Harvesting Copper from Microwave Ovens

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Obsolete appliances were once a gold mine of parts, free for the taking with a few snips of your diagonal cutters. Times have changed, though, and most devices yield only a paltry supply of parts, so much so that only by harvesting raw materials can you get much value out of them. And so we have this example of reclaiming copper from used microwave ovens.

The primary source of copper in most microwaves is the transformer, which we usually see re-tasked for everything from spot welders to material handling electromagnets. But the transformer is not the only source of the …read more

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Dual-Purpose DIY Spot Welder Built with Safety in Mind

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Ho-hum, another microwave oven transformer spot welder, right? Nope, not this one — [Kerry Wong]’s entry in the MOT spot welder arms race was built with safety in mind and has value-added features.

As [Kerry] points out, most MOT spot welder builds use a momentary switch of some sort to power the primary side of the transformer. Given that this means putting mains voltage dangerously close to your finger, [Kerry] chose to distance himself from the angry pixies and switch the primary with a triac. Not only that, he optically coupled the triac’s trigger to a small one-shot timer built …read more

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Put Plasma to Work with this Basic Toolkit

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Fair warning: [Justin Atkin]’s video on how to make plasma, fusors, and magnetrons is a bit long. But it’s worth watching because he’s laying a foundation for a series of experiments with plasma, which looks like it will be a lot of fun.

After a nice primer on the physics of plasma, [Justin] goes into some detail about the basic tools of the trade: high voltage and high vacuum. A couple of scrap microwave oven transformers, a bridge rectifier, and a capacitor provide the 2000 volts DC output needed. It’s a workable setup, but we’ll take issue with the incredibly …read more

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Heavy Lift Electromagnet from Microwave Oven Transformers

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It’s OK, you can admit it — from the time you first saw those huge electromagnetic cranes in scrap yards you’ve wanted to have one. While it may not fling around a car, parts donated from scrapped microwaves can let you build your own electromagnetic lifting device and make that dream finally come true.

We recently watched [MakeItExtreme] turn a couple of microwave oven transformers into a somewhat ill-advised wall-climbing rig. It looks like that may have been the inspiration for this build, and the finished product appears to be a tad more useful this time. The frames of three …read more

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Microwave Ovens Turn You into Spiderman

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Want to climb a wall like Spiderman? No problem – just whip up a climbing rig with microwave oven transformers. And find a steel building. And rewrite the canon so that Peter Parker is bitten by an electromagnetic spider instead of a radioactive one.

Back in the reality-based world, you’d probably be taking you life in your hands if you use [Make It Extreme]’s rig to get more than a dozen feet above the ground. The basics are pretty sound, but the devil is in the details. Four MOTs are cut and stripped of their secondary coils and attached to …read more

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