Copenhagen Mk III "Magneto"

by James Wampler
(Shelbyville, Ky. USA)

Maybe it is my camp director/childcare background, but I continue my search for the solar cooker that snaps together like a lego set. The way it is currently set up is finicky with the twist ties/shoelace.

This weekend, while looking for a more streamlined approach, I used some magnets I had lying around to try to create a quick assembling/disassembling copenhagen. I was wasteful with the magnets, because I had plenty of extras from a different project. It uses 12 of the wafer neodymium magnets. If you used velcro, it wouldn't be as nifty, but it would be cheaper/lower impact and be only marginally more work to put together/take apart.

I'd like to get to the point where I have something a 5 year old can pull out of a backpack and snap together. Still a work in progress. Ideally, the magnets would have gone at the corners, but they are strong and tend to repel each other.

This is not the final design. I'm a tinkerer, so there will probably be many more iterations.

----In other news, I won the SolSource photo contest with pictures of using the solar cooker during our cold and snowy cold snap a few weeks ago. I received a very comfortable "SolSource" T-shirt in the mail. It's the small things.