Prop: Shop - How to Make a Vacuum Forming Machine

This might be a little beyond my skill set at this point, but with the shift of material science from a semester to a full year, this might be in the future.

Gonna need myself a little suctioned viking head.

Phase Transition in Steel

That's an interesting addition to the iron wire demo: a glass rod to exaggerate the 'dip'.

The glass rod makes sense because it's non-conductive enough to not be too dangerous, I would think.

The graphing on the video really makes the phase transitions remarkably visible, though.

I like it.

The video's description gives a little more detail as well as the reason for the slow, overall downward slope.

A steel wire is heated up by a current and it expands. When the phase transition temperature is reached the wire takes up additional energy which cools the wire down for a short time and shortens it. 

This step can also be observed in the opposite direction when the current is switched off and the wire cools down. When the phase transition takes place the wire is heated up and it expands for a short time. 

Over three cycles the thin wire gets already worn out. Is is deformed so that the diameter, the heating power and the temperature is not equal along the wire and the phase change occurs more distributed over time.

Heat treating tool steel -- the phase change

I'm going to trust the video's description (copied below) when it says that the flashes of light at 0:32 are visual indications of the BCC --> FCC phase change that takes place at 910 C.

Visual indication of tool steel phase change to austenite when heat treating. Small pools of iron are forced from the steel as the volumetric change takes place and small amounts of carbon are burned off.

So, my understanding from reading that, is that the BCC (ferrite) --> FCC (austenite) change squeezes some of the carbon out of the structure. That carbon then - because of the high temp and the presence of oxygen around the steel - burns off in the flashes that we see.

Can anybody tell me that I'm reading the situation correctly?

The Coolest Way to Open a Bottle of Wine

Yeah, that's one way to open a bottle of wine.

Shatter the glass, yeah.

It causes some secondary challenges (possible shards of glass in the wine, a messy lip of broken glass), all of which seem to have brought about solutions to those challenges.

As neat as the science is (hot glass contracts quickly and unevenly when cooled suddenly, aka thermal shock), the whole process just seems needlessly Rube Goldbergian to me.