Friday, November 23, 2007

Motor & Toasty Wires

Tonight I experimented with something akin to a Beakman motor.

I connected the whole thing up, brought my ceramic magnets within close proximity to the coil.

Before I brought the magnet into vecinity I watched with horror as the 22 AWG wire's insulation melted back and I saw the solid wire red-hot...actually orange. Smoke followed this.

At any rate it worked!



How did I make it?

Materials:

  • Magnet wire - it's copper with a transparent coating

  • Magnets - I used 3 ceramic magnets stacked together

  • Battery - 12 v - probably more than I needed, but hey, it's what I had available

  • 2 Paper Clips

  • Sharp knife (used to scrape some of the transparent coating from the magnet wire



Steps:

  • Take ~3 ft of magnet wire and wrap it around something like a D-battery...I used a wooden cylinder-shaped block from the toy-box. Leave about 1.5 inches on each end.

  • Scrape the transparent coating off one half of the tails of the magnet wire.

  • Make a stand out of the paper clips. One for the left side and one for the right side. They should NOT be touching.
  • Place the loop (the armature on the stand

  • Place the magnets near the wire loop

  • Connect power to both paper clip stands - negative on one side, positive on the other

  • If the motor (armature) does not start to rotate then tap it a bit so the scraped sections of the armature can briefly touch the energized paper clip stands

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