To nuke or not to nuke

[Rookie]

At this early stage, my obsession is centred around the fact that the turntables of all microwaves seem to rotate exactly a whole number of revs in one minute so that the handle of the cup is facing you when it finishes if you press a whole number of minutes. Ours does 5 RPM, my son's does 6, a friend's does 4. So I now know my 12 times table - pressing 36 secs or 48 or whatever so that the handle faces me when it's finished. Tomorrow I must get a life.

Might want to look a little closer Geoff. My mug in the microwave ends up just about anywhere, and it's a pretty old microwave. I know that a lot of the new ones now return the turntable to the same positiopn that it started in once the mocrowaving has finished. Have a look and see if yours is one of those, or just a smarter one than mine.

[Rookie]

I was concious of the effect when I put lights in my shed, but no matter how I tried I could not reproduce the effect on routers, drills, circular saws and other rotating objects. I put them in good lighting (fluro spotties) and ran them through their speed ranges but nothing was evident.

I suspect that not only does the light need to be quite strong and but there also needs to be good contrast between the teeth, blades etc and the background to produce the effect which is why the little discs in the centre of turntables work as they have black and white segements and I supose the internal lighting is strong enough.

A mate of mine used to run a large industrial fabricating establishment and he was very aware of it as an OH&S issue

Ian

I think that twin fluoro setups now are set out of phase with each other, so the strobe effect is avoided. Heard that somewhere but I'm no expert.