Don't Try This At Home: NiChrome Wire

hey everybody this is live from the free science workshop now since we've all been spending a lot more time in the places that we live you might have gotten curious and looked around at some of your appliances maybe a hairdryer maybe a toaster well hopefully your toaster does it look like this we all have things in our lives that we just sort of use without maybe thinking about what's going on why they're doing what they're doing or how the heck that actually happens so today we're going to take a closer look inside and show you how we part of the power of these appliances turn into one of our favorite science tools here at the workshop specifically what we're looking for is something called nichrome wire in this hair dryer for instance if you take a look in the back end you can see that coil of wire inside that's what heats up to create the hot air to bloat your hair if we want to take a look at this outset of the hair dryer someone from our take apart zone has managed to extract one of these buddies this is what's happening inside your hair dryer you can see the coil of wire kind of spins down like a curly slide and ends up connecting to a power source inside the toaster we can find nichrome in these little strips on the walls see if we can get ourselves in focus there right about there when you press down the lever to sync your bread into the toaster these small bits of nichrome along the side are also going to heat up you can often see them glow orange if you get your face close enough to take a look but not so close to burn yourself thankfully we have an experimental hairdryer that we can mess around with just a little to see if we can get a glimpse of this nichrome in action now usually when a hairdryer is going this little fan in the back is gonna disperse the heat out the front of the hairdryer to keep anything from getting too hot however if we block that airflow and there's no way to disperse the heat you'll be able to see the nichrome glow orange red hot as that electricity passes through it now this is definitely not something you should be trying at home that's one of the reasons we have a free science workshop the wire is called nichrome because it's made up of a mix of nickel and chromium which ends up being super super resistive so we've got a spool of it here when you pass the smallest bit of current through your nichrome the fact that it's so resistive it's gonna cause it to heat up now I probably shouldn't touch this to anything but we can use this mad science power to help us build some of our crazy creations this is our nichrome foam cutter if you take a closer look you might be able to recognize some pieces we've salvaged from other projects we've got a base made of scrap wood some drawer poles to keep your distance from the nichrome wire here alligator clips and springs some fans from our old discarded computers a pirate the power source in a very old-school switch from who knows where that came from but let's take a look at how this actually works we can tell the power is on now because the fans are running which also means that electrical current is passing through the nichrome wire and because of its resistive properties is now incredibly hot hot enough in fact to slice through most types of foam [Music] this is a fairly new tool of the workshop but it's already seen some pretty incredible projects take shape from 3d signs to custom masks and costume pieces or even just to de-stress with some oddly satisfying abstract art the foam cutter will be here waiting for you when we reopen [Music] what kinds of projects can you think up to use this tool let us know and we can feature your ideas right here on the free science page until next time stay safe and stay curious [Music]

Channel: Free Science Workshop

Views: 6,973

Rating: 4.7560978 out of 5

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Id: Fczpk_UEh8g

Length: 5min 3sec (303 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 15 2020