2014-08-14

Another life prolonged.

The old microwave oven looked too good to junk without attempting a repair, since magnetron's are much the same as old style vacuum tubes they should be pretty hardy when things go pear shaped, and the sparking seemed to show it was still operating, so I ordered some new little tin cans shown here that they call antennas as well as mica sheets that I cut to size as the old mica waveguide cover had burnt.
End result is it works like a charm but be warned the magnetron runs on voltages that are very high ~4000 Volts, this can be quite fatal and shorting out the capacitor that feeds it before doing anything is advised, though waiting a while should suffice as they do have a shorting resistor to slowly drop the stored energy in the capacitor.
The other life prolonged recently is mine, good or bad.

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