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Magnets

Johnny Pneumatic

Master Poster
J
Joined
Oct 15, 2003
Messages
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conering560.jpg



Is the ring floating?
 
Sheesh, how the hell would you tell? Looks like it's just stuck on that cone from this angle. Show me another one.
 
From your quoted site:

It'll resist until it passes the tip and then click into place, like this. This feels much the same as forcing a ring magnet onto a rod magnet, but the cone-and-ring combo lets you do a trick
Click to expand...

It's not floating, and he says so himself. It's stuck on there. There's a lot of fun you can have playing with magnets. Or so it seems to me - my parents were cheap bastards.

Further note: have you ever tried the ring-magnet onto rod-magnet trick he's talking about? You can shoot those rings pretty good that way with a strong enugh magnet. Switching to a cone only means you don't have to hold the ring in the sweet spot yourself (because it can't slip back).
 
The magnet is not floating. Go back and read the website. They make no claim that the magnet is floating...
 
bewareofdogmas, please remove the pictures and rehost them yourself. stealing other peoples bandwidith is a no-no.
 
Brian said:

If that puppy is neodymium, try not to lose any fingers!
Click to expand...

The author of the website mentions this too, but it really can't be stressed enough. These aren't your momma's fridge magnets, by a longshot.
 
I'd like to build one of those magnetic "rail gun" things. X is a magnet and O is a ball bearing:

O XO XO XO XO XO XO XO XO

You push the leftmost ball against the nearest magnet. It imparts it's momentum to the ball on the other side, which leaves the magnet and moves toward the next, gaining momentum from the magnetic attraction. And so on, and so forth, until the ball at the end leaves at high velocity.

Found it on a website, can't remember where.

David
 
Hrm... the railguns I'm familiar with - here's an example (I put "railgun" into google and hit "I'm feeling lucky.")

http://www.railgun.org/

...don't work like that at all. In fact, unless you're talking about some rapidly-switched electromagnets, I can't see how the device you describe could work to add more force than you could with a single magnet (like in the above cone example).

(Edited to add: in fact, what your proposing there looks suspiciously like a perpetual motion machine...)

Why are there no magnets around the rails? -
The magnetic field in a true railgun is induced by the current in the rails, not by the application of exterior field.
Click to expand...

There's no magnets in your typical railgun.
 
Thanks, David-

Gauss rifles are fascinating too. I always thought they worked using electromagnets, not "plain-old" magnets.

That's really fascinating. It took me a little while to see why it's not a perpetual motion machine. Tell me if I'm right - in layman's terms, you'd say that keeping the marble 5/8th of an inch fromt he square magnet is *stored energy?* int he sense that that ball wants to "fall" onto the magnet?
 
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