Microwave techniques are of interest to the materials chemistry community as they allow access to new metastable materials, and offer synthetic routes that are considerably quicker and less energy intensive than conventional solid state synthesis methods. Unfortunately, there is a lack of understanding of how and why microwave reactions proceed as they do, and this is a considerable barrier to further development in the field. In-situ, time-resolved neutron diffraction will allow us to gain considerable insight into the mechanism of microwave reactions. For this purpose, we are constructing a bespoke microwave reactor for use on the POLARIS diffractometer, and this proposal involves the testing of this reactor, and preliminary experiments concerning the microwave synthesis of tungsten carbide, WC.