thing 2 do wiv a microwave

Warning:Everything you experiment is at your own risk !!!

Never misabuse your oven for these experiments for more than 10-20 seconds. After these 10-20 seconds you must let your oven cool down for a few minutes !!!

Take an old CD or CD-R and put it in the oven, standing up. Put it against a glass cup or so. Don't use any metal as a holder. It will look like the image shown below. This image is a computer generated and rendered image from Carl Licke / Turbid design but the CD part in the middle is an actual taken picture. Notice the difference in the pattern that will show up in the metal layer in the CD between a normal silver CD and a green or gold or blue CD-R. Make sure you don't inhale the gas that comes out of the CD. It's not too good for your health, so they say

Place a wooden tooth pick standing up in your oven and light the top so it burns slowly. I placed mine between the clip of a plastic pencil top. A cork will do fine too I guess. Matches instead of the tooth pick will also do but they will produce less spectacular effects. Now close the door and see what happens. You didn't expect that eh? Nice yellow / orange / green / blue fireballs going up from the stick. Uh,.... yes as you might suspect, your oven will become a bit black inside here and there. But I had no problems cleaning it up. Take care that the plastic inside your oven won't melt because of the burning stick (the plastic on the top of my oven hangs down a bit now ;-}. I also tried pieces of burning charcole and a burning piece of a beer-mat. Materials like that also work (they only need to glow, not nurn) but the tooth pick works best. The actual flame doesn't have to be big for good effects.

Fire balls like this one shoot up out of the tooth pick.

Most laserprinters and photo copiers have a lamp inside which is not there for the light but only for the warmth. Usually they are hudreths of watts and very long and thin and located inside the drum (a rubber roller). This is how mine looks like
So I thought, hey, why not put it in the microwave and see what happens (something a real fan of this page should think this too whenever he/she gets his/her hands on something that might do something funny inside of a microwave). Well, this is what it does:

And later on the left end of the wire (lower left) starts to burn (inside the glass).

tried a small TL tube in the microwave and it looks nice:

And this shows how nice it burns