From Huge and Painfull to Tiny and Easily Lost
Back to Magnetics or Ian.Org's Homepage.Here we have the majority of my NIB magnets. Many of these are SERIOUSLY strong. Most are ripped from hard drives, others more recently were bought. It's only in the past years you can buy these. They used to be far too expensive for a consumer to just buy a handful.
The red ones in the middle are spheres and disks I coated in rubber so they can be handled without hurting your fingers. Spherical magnets are FUN but very fragile. The poles chip easy if they are allowed to snap together, which they do very easily when playing with them. Giving them a rubber finish saves them after you smash the metal coating apart and otherwise abuse them.
The white magnets are from various hard drives. I used to have three each of the ones to the lower left, but a friend broke one of a pair, and I managed to recently break another. The broken halves are on the right.
These are the most powerful I own. The ones on the the left are 1 inch cubes, the others are 1.5" dia disks.
They will break your fingers if you make a mistake and let them bite you.
To assemble and disassemble the stacks I had to make special forms out of wood that let me slide them into and out of position. Even with the help it takes a good amoung of muscle to keep them from slamming together. If you tried to just let two of these snap together, they would violently explode into a thousand high-velocity fragments.
Either of these stacks can visibly distort a TV from over six feet away.
This is a small Halbach array I built from 1/4" magnets.
And this goes to demonstrate how magnets attract metal AND cats!
