Will It Lens? Table of Contents


Welcome, all! Here are links to everything in the “Will It Lens?” series.

  • Part 1: introduction, melting pennies, dimes, toothpaste, Tylenol, milk, chalk, gourd, can.
  • Part 2: equipment upgrades, CDs, disposable silverware, brass penny, burned pennies.
  • Part 3 (Food Edition): popcorn, grape, kumquat, Frosted Mini Wheat, jelly beans, Reese’s Pieces.
  • Part 4: wood, quarter, soap, dishwasher detergent, bacon, egg, honey, seashell, almonds, gummy bears, M&Ms.
  • Part 5 (Temperature Breakthrough): marshmallow, peeps, copper, iron, sand, glass
  • More to come soon eventually!
  • Gallery of all pictures: This contains every picture we took. There’s a lot of junk in here; the good pictures are in the blog posts above.


FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS AND SUGGESTIONS (updated)

  1. Can you melt glass?

    This surprised us, but yes! Normal glass is more properly called “sodalime glass,” which has a much lower melting point than pure silicon dioxide (which we originally thought glass was made of, and which we haven’t been able to melt yet). However, we have trouble melting clear things because they don’t absorb the sunlight. Nonetheless, we melted a dark brown glass in part 5.

  2. Can you melt sand?

    Kinda. The sand we tried is a mixture of quartz, feldspar, and iron. We can melt the last two, but we haven’t melted quartz yet. Look at part 5 for more details.

  3. Can you lens electronics?

    We probably could, but we don’t want to because the fumes are really noxious. There’s lead and other stuff that’s terrible for your lungs in there.

  4. Can you use a second lens to focus the light even more?

    No, that’s not how optics works. For a slightly more thorough answer, see the Light Sharpener FAQ over at cockeyed.com.

  5. Where did you get the lens? How much did it cost?

    I think we got it from here. When we ordered it, I think it was about $120, plus shipping. If you include the wood for the frame and stand, the welding goggles, and the skillet, we’ve probably spent over $200 on lens-related stuff so far.

  6. You should lens something that will burst and explode all over the place!

    That would be very entertaining, but we need to clean everything up before lunch is over, so we’re not doing anything too messy in the foreseeable future (no unopened pop cans, no aerosols, etc.). If we ever take the lens out to the middle of the desert, we will consider lensing messy things.

  7. You should lens an iPhone, iPod, or other hip status symbol.

    First, see question 3 about electronics. Then, remember that we’re paying for all of this with our own money. We’d prefer not to lens anything that costs more than a couple dollars. Everything we’ve tried so far has cost under $1 each (almost everything is under $0.25 each).

  8. Isn’t it illegal to destroy money?

    Not unless you do it with the intent to defraud someone. Remember the last time you went to the zoo? You probably saw one of those machines that will take your penny, flatten it out, and stamp an image of a penguin or something on it as a souvenir. Melting a penny is no more illegal than one of those machines.

Other articles that link to this series:

Will It Lens? Part 4

If you’ve missed it, here are parts one, two, and three of our adventures with a 4’x3′ fresnel lens, along with a gallery of all the pictures.

Our lens arrived with a corner chipped off, so the lens company sent us a second one for free (which also had its corner chipped off on arrival, but we didn’t get a third for free). I’ve been holding off writing this post because I was hoping to title it “Episode IV: A New Lens,” but we still haven’t built the frame for the second lens or the frame for the mirrors that will reflect light from both lenses onto a single point. So, instead of waiting for that to happen, I’m posting the results I’ve already got.

The same SAFETY NOTES as before apply, as always. In lieu of new safety warnings (we haven’t had any new dangers come up!), I’ve got a few tips for anyone trying to duplicate this. Some tips for fellow lensers, followed by more pictures of results →

Mother of All Funk Chords

Oh man, this is awesome! and as icing on the cake, the creator cites all of his sources!

This is why current “IP” rights need to swing further towards fair use: so you can do this sort of awesomeness. The kid with the trumpet just played a scale; the real value here was added by the remixer, and I think it’s bullshit that legally, that trumpet player could send a DMCA takedown notice for this. To the best of my knowledge, the trumpeter has no such intentions; I’m just making a hypothetical here.

Hopefully this sort of remixing will convince the musicians who don’t get it yet that it’s important to allow everyone to have fair use rights. Damn this stuff is sweet!

Vannevar Bush would be proud

The hawks are circling Iran again

What the crap is this!? Here are some of today’s headlines:

If you just glanced at today’s headlines, would you think Iran was building a nuke and was likely to have it very soon? I certainly would. It’s only after you read the articles that you find out the actual “story” is that Iran theoretically has enough uranium atoms to make a bomb but would first need to enrich them to become weapons grade, and they won’t have the technical capability to do that for years to come. What the articles don’t even mention is that the uranium is part of Iran’s civilian power program, it’s purified enough to be used in a nuclear power plant but not a bomb, Iran has signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty under which it is given the inalienable right to civilian nuclear power but pledges not to pursue nuclear weapons, and the International Atomic Energy Agency has signed off on the whole program.

What kind of bullshit is this!? This is not newsworthy and will only confuse people more about Iran. It’s like saying that by living near the beach, I’ve amassed enough silicon to build my own computer from scratch (something I’ve thought would be cool to do for years: I want to start with raw materials and make a 2-function calculator or something). Except that when you get down to it, I’d still need to purify and dope the silicon, create transistors and then connect thousands of them in the right order to get anything close to the results I want. So, while it’s technically true that I’ve got access to enough silicon, I’m actually still years away from results (and not actively working on it in the first place). It’s a non-issue.

It really irks me that the press picks up on this drivel while ignoring things like, say, the terrorist building a dirty bomb on US soil, which seems far more interesting, relevant, imminent, and dangerous (original source on page 11 of this leaked FBI document). Bruce Schneier suggests that this isn’t pressworthy because the terrorist wasn’t Muslim. Hooray, anti-Muslim bias in the media!

To be fair, I’ve found three articles on Iran today whose headlines don’t seem overly misleading: Reuters’ Iran “not close” to nuclear weapon: Gates, Politico’s Gates and Mullen disagree on Iran (which at least mentions that not everyone in government thinks Iran is getting a nuke tomorrow, though it does sow the seeds of doubt), and the Tehran Times’ IAEA officials: All materials at Natanz under control (though honestly, no one is going to believe the Tehran Times if it’s the minority dissenting voice about Iranian operations).

and people wonder why I get so frustrated with the media.

Will It Lens? Food Edition

If you missed it, here’s part 1 and part 2 of our adventures with a 4’x3′ fresnel lens. As always, I’ve got a gallery of all the raw pictures, and this is a summary of the good ones.

The same SAFETY NOTES as before apply, with the addition that you shouldn’t eat any food you cooked in the same skillet in which you just cooked non-edible things (plastics, coins, etc). Also, we’ve upgraded our welding goggles, from a shade 5 filter to a shade 12, which is actually good enough that you can stare at stuff in the focal point. It’s not quite good enough to stare directly at the sun, but it’s darn close, and rumor has it that you can watch sunspots through this thing if you don’t look at them too long.

Last time, I left you with a picture of popcorn getting ready to be lensed. More results with more pictures →

Will It Lens? Part 2

In case you missed it, here’s part 1 of our adventures with the 3’x4′ fresnel lens.

Oh, man. I have lots more pictures. The same SAFETY NOTE as last time applies again, but with a few more additions. You should probably wash your hands after you’re done handling stuff in the lens. In particular, when you heat copper up until it turns black, you’ve probably made copper (II) oxide, which is a somewhat nasty irritant. I also make no guarantees about how many carcinogens we’ve made/touched/breathed, although so far I still feel healthy (no cancer in the past week!). Speaking of health hazards, if you use a frying pan to hold stuff, make sure it doesn’t have a Teflon non-stick coating! That coating will burn away and become a huge safety hazard (it’s mainly fluorine, and most fluorine compounds are toxic, volatile, and several other kinds of nasty; quite a few fluorine compounds were used as chemical weapons and precursors to sarin nerve gas, so avoid it at all costs). We got a cast-iron skillet, which is reasonably safe and inert, and it doesn’t melt until we break 1800K, which is very unlikely with our current setup.

Anyway, on to the results. with more pictures, of course. →

I’m not usually into beatnik stuff,

but this is pretty good.

Protected: My name in print (sort of)

This content is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

A new vulnerability in Java

Looking at Sun’s take on it and Secunia’s links, there’s a fun little exploit in Java’s calendar objects that can allow a remote user to obtain escalated privileges, allowing them to read, write, and execute any files on your computer that you have access to. The interesting thing about this bug is that it doesn’t depend on memory being set up a certain way, which means it works reliably on a whole bunch of versions of Java, and in Mac, Windows, and *nix environments. You should update to the most recent version of Java to avoid this (see the Resolution section in the link to Sun above). Also, if you don’t use Java applets on the web, you might consider disabling Java in your browser (for Firefox, it’s under Edit > Preferences in the Content tab), so you don’t need to worry about this (programs that you download and run manually are much less likely to have exploits than programs you might automatically start running from visiting the wrong website).