I bought this lens almost 2 years ago, and never got around to doing anything with it until now. This weekend I just had to make a stand for it. I had Memorial Day off and the Tuesday after and the weather was going to be sunny all week. Perfect for it something solar powered.
I did the quick and dirty job, I just needed to complete it in day. Still I would try to make it fairly decent and use it as an opportunity to test some ideas. One area I tried to do well was to make the frame for the lens strong as any future improvements would benefit.
A couple of observations I had during construction. The lens is a sheet of acrylic and sags a little in the middle. Maybe 1/2" or so. Pretty annoying but it still works, I don't know if the performance is degraded significantly. Second the sheet itself appears to be frosty, it doesn't look clear, I don't know how these lenses are rated and since this lens was surplus who knows if it is really ideal for what I plan on using it for. In the future I will try to measure it's efficiency and other things like max temperature etc. Maybe I can estimate it's efficiency by heating water and measuring the temp increase vs. mass vs time. You get the point.
One thing that worked out pretty nice the 1x1 cedar rail pieces I used for the frame. They had been kicking around for a while and I finally found a decent use for them. They were very straight and light, and made what appears to be a very nice light but substantial frame for the lens.
Once I got it together I had to go burn something. The first item was a stick that blackened nicely and smoked and after a little while started to burn. It was bone dry and punky. After having fun with that I move on to melting zinc pennies. That was pretty satisfying for a few cents. Next I tried boiling water. It did boil but was not a gratifying boil.
I decided to call it a day and get some other stuff done.
Next I want to add some cranks and mechanisms to adjust the rotation and angle of the lens. From there I think adding stepper motor control would be cool. If it tracked the sun it would be much more useful.
Sorry for the poor video quality, but the stick does burn, a little.
Again, sorry for the poor video quality, and poor cinematography, but keep in mind, the Penny LOOSES. Yeah it gets it good.
Check out some of the other posts:
http://r625.blogspot.com/2007/09/buster-robot.html
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