Wayne - email - url
Just to answer my own question, “How does a kid get to be 50 years old (almost) before making a solar cooker?”, I plead a lack of resources for the most of my life. The library and its contents was the most of my inspiration when I was a kid, and grateful that I was for it, it was lacking in the utter volume and density of information in small bites that the internet provides now. Understand I’m not knocking the library as an institution by any means, but the ability to search the internet and find exactly what you want in seconds is far removed from wandering the stacks of 40 years ago. I’m also aware that the internets contain all kinds of crap.
Nonetheless it’s a kind of miracle. It’s not just the ease of finding what you want, and the consequent learning. It’s the broadening of range of information - published books (at least 40 years ago) simply didn’t exist that described a solar cooker. Web pages tend to fill in the holes left by academics and unfilled by published books.
Thursday: 27 October 2005 @ 07:24:05
Rurality - email - url
Hey, cool! At first I thought the ant was using a death ray on all of us though. 
If you get a chance, come look at my post from yesterday and tell me what you think about which Rudbeckia I’ve got. (Or if it’s something else.)
Thursday: 27 October 2005 @ 13:38:44
Ontario Wanderer - email - url
Back to my high school days (daze?) again, I think we had a great, innovative teacher. We made not one but two solar cookers in the late 50’s. One was, as I remember, about 6 feet in height and 4 feet long. The plywood parabolic shape was covered with metal which, in the end was coated with foil to increase the reflective value. (Imagine an opened up 6 foot tall capital letter C whose width has been stretched.) A black stovepipe was placed along the focus point and we stuffed room temperatures wieners in one end and took out hot dogs at the other. OK they were not too hot due to the difficulty of getting the set up aimed at the sun correctly, keeping watchers out of the sunlight, wrinkles in the foil, etc. but it did get across the main idea of the uses of a parabolic curve. On the other hand, the other solar cooker was made from a frenzel (sp?) plastic magnifying lens. With that one, one could melt ceramic glazes on small tiles and, yes, set wood items on fire instantly. I always wanted to build the second kind and even got the lens but that was as far as it went. I wonder where that lens is now? Maybe I should look through my old trunk....
Friday: 28 October 2005 @ 05:22:26
Laura - email - url
A Fresnel lens! My parents made us a solar cooker with a Fresnel lens, and then later took the frame apart and gave me the lens for my wood-burning hobby (signs and little decorative plaques). I could burn much broader lines, much faster, but sometimes the wood actually caught fire and I’d have a big black flare mark across my calligraphy. Recently my son came home saying that he and a friend had been burning holes in dry leaves with a magnifying glass (carefully, over concrete), and did we have a magnifying glass? Not one that I wanted to hand over, so we set out to the pharmacy (the only one in our little town), and there we found several different magnifying glasses. To my delight, they also had a full-page plastic magnifier - the Fresnel lens - but I was relieved that my son didn’t want one of those.
Friday: 28 October 2005 @ 21:25:12