Microwave Oven Bananza

["Tesla list" <tesla-at-pupman-dot-com>]

Original poster: "by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>" <Tesla729-at-cs-dot-com>

Hey all, 

I just wanted to share with this list my recent find of 
old microwave ovens. I had noticed several discarded 
microwave ovens sitting on the curbside in front of a 
small stripmall near my home a couple of months 
ago but never got around to retrieving them before the 
garbage collectors did. However, Friday evening I 
spotted five more sitting in the same place so I returned 
with my old pick-up truck and saved them from the gar- 
bage collector. I looked up at the business that they were 
laying in front of and realized that it was an appliance 
repair shop. I never even realized that it was there! 
I've already gutted all but one of them of all of their 
transformers, capacitors, diodes, and magnets, and 
will return the gutted carcasses to my curbside for 
garbage pick up. I haven't gotten around to checking 
the transformers yet but I have yet to find a disfunc- 
tional tranny in a discarded microwave oven to date. 
All of the caps checked out within 2% of their name- 
plate capacitance according to my capacitance me- 
ter. BTW, one of  them had a nice shiny-cored, beefy 
tranny in it :-) 

I just though that I would share that with some of you 
fellow coilers that are looking for MOTs for your coil 
project to let you know that if you look around appli- 
ance repair shops, you may very well be able to get 
MOTs as well as other electronic goodies for free 
and you can't beat that price :-) 

Sparkin' in Memphis, TN, 
David Rieben