Re: [ATM] Microwave heating of glass

[Dominic-Luc Webb <dlwebb@canit.se>]

On Wed, 9 Jan 2008, Ian Williams wrote:

> Ah, so that's how its done!  The main problem then is that the average
> home microwave is probably not powerful enough.

Well Ian, you brought this up in the original posting, and the
youtube clip you gave a link to mentioned something about
flowing glass. In my mind this is also a matter of insulation
and energy distribution. A regular home microwave isn't large
enough to hold much glass, so I assumed from the onset we were
talking about smaller glass pieces. If the home oven works for
beer bottles, then there is a fare chance it can be scaled up.

We should keep in mind that even 2kW is small compared to a
made-for-the-purpose glass kiln. One small hobby kiln I have
been eyeballing is about 3 kW:

http://www.warm-glass.co.uk/documents/The%20Paragon%20SC2%20Kiln.pdf

Volume is not much, about 20 cm square and similar height. Price
is about 500 brittish pounds (1000 USD), so kind of pricy if you
are only wanting to melt smaller pieces. For this money, I could
buy a lot of used microwaves, and by comparison, could even
regard used microwaves as essentially disposable. With the hobby
kilns, the max temp is about 1000-1100 C. I somehow remember a
long while back deciding I wanted an oven that could do a bit
more than this for melting wine bottles into mirrors.

I think this microwave technique is more than anything cute and
would make a nice conversation piece. I once pieced together a
small 230VAC 2.3 kW heater with a homemade dimmer. I do not know
if a dimmer is an appropriate circuit to control energy, but I was
able to fire up kanthal elements that can provide a lot more heat
than most hobby kilns:

http://www.kanthal.com/C12570A7004E2D46/062CC3B124D69A8EC1256988002A3D76/2D94F5709F76097FC12570AE003029E0

Dominic


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