oooh look! magnets!

found this sort of interesting...well, i do read popular schience and popular mechanics. needless to say i love lux and lumens. but i also am entertained by superconductors and magnetic levitaion and inductive currents and I ran into this site looking how to spell neodymium.

http://www.wondermagnet.com/superconductor.html
http://www.wondermagnets.com/cgi-bin/edatcat/WMSstore.pl?user_action=detail&catalogno=3140
http://www.wondermagnet.com/diacglev.html

this reminds me of my Metals Tech and Sci tech classes in my high school. we used to try to design small race vehicles that levitated on a magnetic track and had sails of sorts to made use of the fan mounted at the start line.

also tractor pull...you were given a choice of 2 motors one high speed and one high torque, and were supposed to design a vehice that can pull the most weight. these were regular radioshack cheapo motors...not Avox brushless RC airplane motors, mind you.

the record stood at 10 lbs or so.
everyone used regular staggered spur gear systems as expected.

my team went a different route, we built a steel frame and used a PWM controller to power the high speed low torque motor and used several worm gear systems...none of the second to 4th stage gears were plastic of course. and the thing was SLOW...i mean way way slow. but it bumped the record up to roughly 300 lbs. could have done more, but they limited the amount of time in which your tractor had to cover the given distance. as most of you suspect, we piled almost as much weight on the vehicle itself to keep the traction, lol.

Leon

The stuff from wondermagnet is pretty darn cool! I bought one of their neodymium magnet samplers, and it's great fun! The magnest are unbelievably powerful for their size.

eBay is a good place to buy neodymium magnets... I got some from there. I bought some rods and some steel balls (non-magnetic) so that I could build shapes and play around.

BTW, if you get two one inch cubes, they can be dangerous. Super strong. Could break a finger if caught the wrong way between them.

Also, be careful, because if the magnets snap together even without yoru skin or flesh in between, they could shatter and you could have a chip fly into an eye.

A little off topic, but acoustic levitation is pretty cool also.

That ferrofluid is used in the new corvettes I beleive. Cool stuff.

Also, see a show years a go that showed a super powerfull electromagnet, and they droped a grasshoper over it, and the grasshopper was floating!!! Crazy!!!

yeah think i saw the same show, they did a spider and a strawberry. the chamber is tiny and takes a trillian gazillion watts to run.

speaking if strawberries...i think i'll have some.

A bunch of rare earths got thrown away at work and I snagged them. They are ~3/4" X 1" X 1/4" and you can put one in your palm and one opposite and they will stay there! Damn things will hold a 3/4" notepad to a refridgerator door! (Not to mention they are literally dangerous if you ain't careful with 'em! /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif )

Larry

I got on of those magnet grabber pick up tools from snap on many years ago. Man, the little eraser size magnet can pick up a full size staple gun and difficult to move around a metal engine compartment to grab a metal screw.