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Dave Johnson's Buckyball-Moving Magnet Machine

By Rain Noe - May 17, 2011

in Object Culture

Call me a hypocrite, but while I'm disdainful of Design for the Sake of Design, I'm all for Mechanical Engineering for the Sake of Mechanical Engineering. Dave Johnson's self-built Magnet Machine sends Buckyballs on a little journey with no purpose, but does demonstrate some cool bits of electromagnetic science:

This machine manipulates small spherical rare earth magnets, slicing one at a time from the end of a long chain, moving it around a bit, then dropping it back to re-connect at the tail end of the chain.

It also demonstrates a little snippet of science called eddy currents. Watch how slowly the magnet falls through the aluminum tube compared to falling through air: the falling magnet generates an electrical current in the tube, and that current in turn generates a magnetic field that opposes the movement of the magnet, slowing it down dramatically.

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Dave Johnson

13 years ago

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Buckyballs is an (unfortunate) brand name for these toy magnets, there are many others. Note that in my youtube description I carefully maintained "brand agnosticism".

I can't say this strongly enough: anyone with a mechanical or scientific or puzzle orientation should get their hands on some of these magnets. I'd still like to know who first figured out that little, strong, spherical magnets could be so much fun.
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Shalin

13 years ago

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agree w/norm.
Video is great though - very suspenseful and what a fantastic, artful, mechanical design :)
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norm

13 years ago

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those are not buckyballs. buckyballs are carbon molecules with a spherical structure like bucky's (Fuller) geodesic domes of icosahedral geometry.
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