Synoptic Labs

My friend Phil has recently been toying around with ferrofluid (a unique type of magnetically reactive liquid) and with the idea of using computer-controlled electromagnets to make them dance. I like this idea and have been building an electromagnet that I hope will be stronger and give us a better response than the magnets we’ve built so far.

Using some mild-steel rod donated by Hazard Factory, I spent some time last week on the lathe working it into the electromagnet casing pictured above.

Believe it or not I’ve spent over 8 hours working on this thing. However most of that can be chalked up to the fact that I haven’t used a lathe much and this has been my first real ‘get to know the lathe’ project. Also, I’ve been unnecessarily compulsive about getting a nice finish on it.

This evening I spent about an hour painstakingly winding an entire spool of magnet wire onto the thing. It was only after I made the final pass and was bundling everything up did I find out that I had inadvertently shorted out the coil at some point and had to scrap the whole winding effort. Doh!

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 24th, 2008 at 11:32 pm and is filed under Tinkering. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.