Awesome. I never would have thought of tearing apart a toaster to first see how they tick.

Where is the Nuclear Reactor?

^ ghostie, I'm not sure if you are being sarcastic or not :)

I probably didn't have to take the toaster apart after having read How Toasters Work however I had a lot of fun tearing something apart I generally use most days.

spankerchief is totally right... I hardly understand how most things work, let alone how to build them from scratch... Having a good time so far!

I am very curious as to why the electricity makes the metal strips light up and not the rest of the metal toaster, which the strips are connected to.

It's all about resistance. The metal that get's hot has a very high conductivity but it also has a very high electrical resistance. This makes it a very inefficient carrier of electric current. It is probably made of nickel-chrome (nichrome) or one of the higher resistance variations of stainless steel, ie, 401 or 308 or some such.

Replace that filament with a copper wire, which has a very high conductivity but a very LOW resistance, and you won't get the heat.

The same can be said of the metal that is holding the ends of the filament. That's why the entire toaster doesn't get hot. Only the filament has high conductivity AND high resistance.

Nope, not being sarcastic at all. I have a long history of diving into projects without understanding what I'm doing, or why I'm doing it. I could show you pictures of my attempts to build a service door for my furnace through the drywall in my garage to illustrate my point, but I have embarrassed myself enough around here.

Tuesday May 23

Doubt I'm going to hit an April 1 deadline since I'm leaving for work/vacation in LA in 4 days... However I have decided how I plan to attempt to get this meeper to work...

Imagine it people!!!

The end of the world... Sure you can still find power in some places...maybe you generate your own somehow with wind or waterwheels... Sure you can still find a PC out there now and again that you can get to boot up... but you know what you can't find??

A TOASTER...And a man needs some meepin toast!

Let's see if this is going to be possible!

There's a fair bit of meep in here!

Oh baby! Move around the HW in this thing and I think we have enough room to insert what we need to cook some toast!

More ot come...

"Doubt I'm going to hit an April 1 deadline since I'm leaving for work/vacation in LA in 4 days... However I have decided how I plan to attempt to get this meeper to work..."

Kudos on being the only one to get started! You know the heat source can be anything from electricity to gas, to the burning corpses of your vanquished enemies(Check local regulations) BTW the deadline is May 1st.

Wednesday MArch 24th

Once again lets remember my retardedness and desire to try to figure this meep out...lol...maybe others can learn something while stating firmly that they knew for sure my plans weren't going to work!!

Holy meepballs my ears are still ringing... Clearly I have more planning to do...though I would say I learned some things... haha

Baseline... Yes I can turn on the light...

Now you might ask yourself... How do you know I can't just cook the bread by applying electric current to it???

Well you can't...

OK... What if you could electrify something... Like maybe a cooking grate and then sit the toast on it?? Will it cook then?

No it won't.... By the way... I'm laughing here..but what you don't see is the giant electrical arc that just shot up in front of my face making my wife jump back in fear, tripping over my dog... I think my ears are bleeding...

Sorry Linc

See the burn marks? You know...I gave a few min thought to filming my adventures and then posting to YouTube... thinking back I should have so you could all be killing yourselves laughing at me...

Last test... On Survivor Man, I once saw the dude use a battery and some steel wool to light a fire... Sounds plausible... Maybe I can add current to Steel wool and it will be fairly resistant like the Nichrome...

THis could maybe work... The problem is that it actually burns, though it gets hot as meep...

Really not worth it though...cause you would have to line two sides with the wool, inside a heat shield and then add current...you might make toast, but would need a lot of wool as you'd use it up each time...

More to come...ugh...

maybe you shouldn't be doing this indoors.

At least he is taking photos while doing it indoors.

Steel: You need nichrome wire stretched across some non-conductive material. Throw in a heating element and a timing mechanism and you have your toaster.

^ Thanks Wrecker... I do kinda know that... The problem is as far as I know, when the zombie apocalypse occurs, the only place to find nichrome is in a toaster...

So since I'm not using toaster parts :) I'm hunting for other inventive ideas...

Don't worry folks! I already have another plan that should not blow me up!

At this point I would like to remind everyone competing that it is their own responsibility to follow all standard safety precautions when working on your entries. I advise careful thought before disassembling otherwise mundane items that operate on electricity, propane or natural gas. If you are even slightly unsure as to the method of safely repurposing said items, I STRONGLY recommend that you get assistance from someone knowledgeable in these matters. I bear no responsibility for singed fingers, cuts and nicks or the unintentional triggering of a nuclear cascade effect causing the devastation of the entire eastern seaboard. You have been warned.

Thanx 4 lisnin' :)

A little gasoline and/or motor oil ought to make that steel wool last longer.

You can buy Nichrome on eBay. You can get it in different thicknesses, lengths, and resistances. Electric tea kettles, electric blankets, the seat heaters in your car, soldering irons, foam cutters, hair dryers, the burners on your electric stove, and many other electric heat sources use it.

If you want to go hotter than toast - say to melt aluminum or something - you can use other materials. Kanthal is popular. You can get that on eBay as well.

Use Ohm's law to calculate how much you need, or how much you can get away with before you blow the circuit breaker.

That is it. You can attach regular wires to the end and stick them in a plug and it will get hot. The rest is an enclosure to hold the element, hold the toast, maybe some insulation so you only heat the toast, and some sort of switch to turn the electricity on and off - which is more convenient than plugging it in and unplugging it.

If you want to get fancy (perhaps to build a kiln or toaster oven) you can add some sort of temperature control circuitry. Use a thermocouple (to sense the temperature). Or, measure the resistance in the heating wire and when it changes too much (because it got too hot), shut it off. Of course you can buy or salvage temperature controllers too.

You can even use a knob assembly from an old electric stove to control the amount of electricity flowing through the nichrome so you can regulate the temperature a little bit.

I think something that clamped onto the toast, like tongs (but make it look like a robot end effector) and then plugged into a motor which rotated the toast to get nice even toasting would be cool.

April 12th...OK! Back from LA! Had a great time... wasted another week not thinking much about the toaster...crunch time!

Luckily on my travels today I was able to snag and throw into my saddle bag, these bad boys! I hope they work when I apply the BANG wires!

Then when I got home I took my son and dog for a stroll in the forest and what did I find on my way home? Yes it is Garbage day tomorrow!

Things are looking up! Although I did run into a snag... The PC shell should be able to provide the power, but big surprise the meeper won't boot... Bad board.

Now I need to figure out a new way to pop the toast. My big plan was to write a batch file that I would basically run that would count down for a preset amount of time (which I could configure to adjust the toasting time) them eject the CD Rom Tray... I had planned to gut the drive and run a cable through it which would follow the tray out when ejected the trigger the release of the toast...

Brilliant? I think so... oh well... Plan B!

April 12th - Update

OK so I cut all the spokes off of the wheel and ran it through the dish washer. I now have all my spokes and plan to use those for my bread basket and the popping mechanism.

Now that I had the burners, how was I going to get them inside the PC... :) Binder clips.

But cliping them so close to the outside of the PC there is a fair bit of space in between each of the burners. I wasn't sure if a piece of bread held in a basket in the middle would be close enough to get toasted.

I better try toasting a piece of toast that isn't super close to a burner.

3 minutes later after walking away for a second.

Oops, set off smoke alarm.

Lastly for the night... I figured I better test both burners... Even though I assumed that applying the electricity to the burner was going to work fine...but after the last time I threw sparks and blew my eardrums I was tentative as meep to play with the live wires again...

But... meep it...

WOO HOO... Both burners get hot and know electrical deaths!!

Stay tuned...

(Cue noticable increase and shift in the breeze)

(Sensing something, Spanky perks up and stares off into the distance)

"Hmmmm...?"

Holy meep, I think you are going to win an awesome treasure chest, OR meeping die inside an electrical fireball.

I made a second key for just in case. My son prefers the plain blackened iron style over anything fancy, so I thought I'd give you the option:

Well,....That, and even though it should be physically impossible to lock the key INSIDE the chest, I just know somehow that somehow you might manage it.

If you die can I have your pink walls? They're cute.

Holy meep!! Skull Key!! I will have more pics tonight with progress... FYI john...the walls are White but there was so much smoke in there it meeped with the camera lens I guess.

Update for April 19th.

OK Crunch time :)

So last night I had a plan: - Make the toast hole - Build the toast basket - Start hooking up the power - Figure out how I was going to keep the bread down and pop back up...

I was not able to complete all this haha...

So I'm thinking, how am I going to cut the toast hole into the top of the PC??

Drill, then cut baby!!

Haha, I took the time to unscrew my hack saw, insert the blade into the tiny hole and work to get the saw back together only to find I would never be able to actually use this method...

"Toaster Build - The Trial and Error of a meep"

So now what?? Oh yeah! Reciprocating saw! Better throw on the safety goggles!

This was awesome... I had the hold the PC down with my feet because the saw was bouncing like crazy... but as soon as I started into the metal it sliced like hard metalic meeper.

After a bit of tomfoolery I got the hole slightly bigger than toast sized and ready for smoothing later!

So I sat down with the wife and tried to think about how I would pop the toast...

At first I was thinking of having some kind of spring loaded clip that held the base where the toast would sit, but I couldn't figure out how to release the clip since I was no longer going to be using the CDRom drive I talked about above.

Then I thought.... Electormagnet! If I build an electromagnet at the base of the toast basket, apply power, then drop the toast... the metal base should stick to the electromagnet... then when I release the power the spring loaded popper will shoot back up...

This is a good idea! How do I make an electromagnet?? Research Time!

ok...I have a big nail...need some wire...

Then I started to work on the bike tire spoke basket and I think I can find a better way to do this... the spokes however will be good for the base of the popping mechanism to connect to the electromagnet!

Lastly I started to work on the PC power supply... I looked up Power Supply hacks and started to get an understanding of what wires were for what...

I didn't get this done, but I seperated and clipped the wires and stripped one colour set to start working on this later...

Pictures and more story to follow...

Cough:sevendaysleft:Cough

Ah:sixdays:Herm!

(sigh)...Five...

Update for Sunday Apr 25th... Now Monday (5 Days--- Ahh meep!!)

OK so this is getting to be a pain right in my meeping meep...haha... Ready for more near explosions?? I should really stop now even though I'm so close...

I think the idea that I had was a good one, however shaping this meep into what I want to do is taking skills I clearly lack but am trying to make up for with sheer trial and error, hoping that people are having fun shaking their heads, whilst reading this post...

OK... So taking off from my last update.... I had a hole in the top of the PC for my toast basket to sit in, but the edges had a lot of burs and was quite sharp... I went out and bought a grinder for my drill and tidied that up...

I then put some metallic duct tape over top to make it even more smooth.

Here is a picture of the work I did getting all the power supply wires seperated and the beginnings of stripping them...

So I asked my electro-cperts LBP and LOki to look at my thread and talk to me about the potential of using the Power Supply to power my burners and electromagnet ...

So LBP read over what I've been doing and laughs saying... Holy meep you built yourself a suicide cord!! I guess my open ended cord I plug into the wall is a big no no... haha... Oh well...

So very likely after listening to the responses, the power supply just wasn't going to cut it...

I decided I would hook up my suicide cord to the burners, and use the power supply for my electromagnet...

My plan was to lay the electromagnet at the base of my toast basket and then bring down the toast on a metal frame to stick to it...

Here is what I'm now using for my toast basket!

Let's see how I faired with the electromagnet shall we?? (I actually have more story and pictures... but have to leave work... more follow up tonight!!

OK follow up... to Sunday's work...

Here is the pictures of the slide in bread basket.

Front view without the panels back on.

After I had worked on the basket a bit I started to look into the electromagnet...

• I had a long iron nail which I was able to stick another magnet too... I wanted to make sure the nail was...you know... metal enough I suppose...

• In reading the above linked instructions, I bought some insulated wire and tightly wound it around my nail...

• I then attached my "Suicide Cable" to this bad boy hoping for a super duper magnet...

Big Mistake people! Don't do this...

Thinking back... my big regret is that when all of the following was occuring I really should have tested to see if the wire, wrapped nail became a super magnet...I never found out...

So I plug this bad boy in... There is a spark and a puff of smoke... (sorry no pics... only my son was standing at the back of the garage and wasn't taking pictures)

Instantly concerned I reach out to pull the cord out... but its stuck in place!

meep... Now I'm not really sure what is going on but the fact that the cord won't come out of the wall and there was a spark alarms me... without trying to see if my nail has become magnetized, I start really pulling on the cord..

Finally as I am straining, the cord pulls free and I go flying backwards into all my tools.... Check out the burnt cord!

Clearly I wasn't going to use full electricity.... So I decide to slow down...take the above sites suggestion and try just using batteries...

This was pretty funny... I tried 1, 2, 3 and 4 connected AA batteries and couldn't get any magnetization of the nail at meeping all...

As we were trying various electrical methods, my son found a marker and a shoebox to domeepent the scientific process...

1. The wall outlet didn't work... (he forgot to mention what it was that didn't work)
2. The batteries didn't work...
3. The Mouse K Box didn't work... (I had no idea what he was talking about till he said... The Music Box you tried... The "Music Box" was actually a Eliminator Battery pack that you can use to power whatever you need....except electromagnets I guess)

Clearly this electromagnet is not going to be an option with 3 days left... Time to clean meep up tonight and test this thing out in some sort of more manual fashion!

TONIGHT IS THE NIGHT PEOPLE!! I HAVE MY PLATE! I HAVE MY PEANUT meepER! IT'S TIME TO CLEANUP THE MESS IN MY GARAGE OF WIRES AND BURNT PIECES OF METAL AND BROKEN BITS OF WHATEVER THE meep AND TEST THIS BAD BOY OUT!!

p.s. Wish my toast luck.... I don't want to die!

.......AND NOW THE GRAND FINALE.... THANK CHRIST!!!

TIME TO QUEUE THE THEME MUSIC. (Open in a new tab!)

The toaster is all assembled... The burners are plugged!

Honestly... After the electromagnet plug mishap...I am tired of doing test runs... so I decided turning this meeper on and toasting was either going to work... or it wasn't!

In go 2 slices of Weight Watchers (thats right) whole wheat bread...and I turn on the beast....

TOP VIEW..... Well... No sparks flew...and I knew the power bar worked... so far so good... I set the timer!!

• I started to feel heat coming out the top hole... (about a minute in)

• The sides of the PC are starting to get quite warm ( 5min 20sec)

• WOOOO finally starting to smell like toast in the Garage (11min)

AND YES!! Here we have it.... after 17minutes and 25seconds in the SUPER TOASTER WE HAVE ACHIEVED A FAIRLY TOASTED STATE OF TOASTINESS!

Time to prepare this yo!!

My toaster come correc!

BOO YAH!

I think if it wasn't 9:00pm I would get my son to eat this toast....

Here goes... Last chance for death on this project! (This will never get photoshopped)

TA DA!!

THE END.... Hope you enjoyed my toasting experience full of me learning how little I know about meep....

I am seriously considering having about 5 of 6 PCs in a line all networked with this one in the center in case I have 18minutes to make toast...

Awesome! My toaster is broken. If I mail you some bread will you toast it and mail it back to me?

Also, just curious since it was a contest about how to toast bread all post apocalyptic-y style shouldn't you have spread your peanut meeper with a meep knife?

Just sayin...

meep... Here is the pic that should have been the 2nd from last :)

My watch says it's 7:38pm Tuesday, April 27th(PST). That means there are less than 4 days left for someone to top your design.

It's possible that somebody might steal your idea and top it off with a simple mechanical timer...but...

I don't see any other entries, or hints that anyone else is even making the attempt.

So, Unless someone throws his/her hand up quick, I'm gonna call this a winner.

Congratulations on teaching yourself a few new skills and thanks for risking life and limb entertaining the meep out of us. You've definitely earned this.

PM me an address to deliver your prize to.

Congratulations Steel, well done. This is where I claim that I could have beaten your meep if life had just given me five minutes to spare (mine was going to be all steampunk brass and brushed alluminium), but you have actually extracted the digit and built one that works.

(Move to have Steel disqualified from any future LS contests as he is now two for two).

That is 100% pure, uncut awesome.

Steel wins LinkSwarm photo contest, and now Toaster contest. How do you fit so much awesome in your dumb body?

I shed some unneeded dignity to make room on occassion.

HOLY <blink>meep</blink>

Hold the phone kids! We have some late-breaking [developments!][1]

Do I smell an upset in the works?

Deadline is still May 1st.

[1]: http://

Oops! Sorry! Got so excited, I durped all over myself.

Stool, you are fukin awesome!! I like the cut of your jib. Well done!

Enjoy my super corny one take masterpiece :) Looking back I wish I spent more time... But I had a bachelor to help toast and encourage puke time for and needed to leave the next moring!!

http://www.youtube.com/v/GckOyrPBPRA&hl=en_US&fs=1&