Stainless Steel Stir Bars - in unlikely places!

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guyb

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Chances are that if you are reading this then you might be looking to make your own stir plate, and are looking to get some stir bars.

Again the chances are that you have either got an old PC that you've stripped and taken the fan out of, if so, the chances are that you've also got an old CD ROM (if you've got an old DVD reader, you might want to put that in your new PC if you got a new one). I took my old CD-R apart as I've got plenty of newer DVD/RW's etc.

Chances are... you're a bit of a chancer! :grin: < I'll get me coat.

Anyhow, if you take the CD apart you will find that there is a motor that is used to drive the CD tray, and if you carefully take it off the board, you can pop the motor spindle out of the case with a screwdriver or similer on the end of the spindle, so you don't scratch the shaft (ooer). :grin:

You'll also find two other spindles which are used to run the optical carriage as the disc is read, you can also extract these, these are much larger, and I would think you could cut these down if required (not sure if any abrasions would hold any contaminants, but I guess if you sterilise correctly, then I would expect they would be ok).

Here's a picture of the extracted bars - I've checked that they stick to a magnet before posting (the HDD magnets that came from the HDD from the now scrapped PC).

The AA battery is shown for scale, as I've not had time to measure the lengths of the bars (I will update later).

94c2be04.jpg


I was going to bin the CD-R anyway (well take it to a responsible recycling place with the rest of the PC).
 
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