Magnetic Levitation

Bill Beaty, the science hobbiest, has come up with a cool way to levitate magnets. I do want to mention one word of caution here, you have to be very careful when building this as neodymium magnets are incredibly powerful and you could easily injure yourself or lose you hand playing with them.

While working on science museum exhibits in 1990 I came up with the above idea: it is known that a spinning metal disk will lift and fling a strong magnet. Therefore, metal rods with opposite spin will lift a magnet but WON’T fling it sideways. It works! I used “sched-80″ heavy wall copper tubes about 1-3/8″ diameter, 12″ long, with 1/4″ wall thickness. I hammered aluminum plugs into the tubes, carved shaft-tips with a lathe, built endblocks and bearings, spun them with an AC/DC motor, and managed to levitate a stack of two 3/4″ diameter neodymium magnets. The spinning tubes must move at about 5000 RPM before the magnet starts floating.

Frank's the editor in chief of tech.nocr.at. He can be found surfing the internet and playing with gadgets. Follow him on twitter @franklinhares