Super Magnets!

January 7, 2004 10:48 PM

The folks at Gaussboys sell these great Neodymium magnets that are many times more powerful than your ordinary magnet. Cylinder #3 works great for the fridge; I hear Disk #20 is good enough for hanging up your bike.
posted by MarkO (35 comments total)

I think disc #20 could support 3 of my bicycles. This is cool stuff. I wonder - if I bought 4 of those #20s, could I strap them to my hands and knees to scale buildings with steel cladding/exterior structural work? Darwin awards, here I come...
posted by bashos_frog at 10:57 PM on January 7, 2004

just don't get two of 'em stuck together.
posted by quonsar at 11:03 PM on January 7, 2004

Silly question - They claim all their magnets are super-powerful and all, but all images have a coin less than an inch from the magnet! I think it's a hoax!!
posted by slater at 11:25 PM on January 7, 2004

You must have a small monitor, slater. On my screen, they're a much more impressive 4" apart.

I have a bunch of these magnets. They're wicked for the fridge.

I'm surprised they offer shipping. AFAIK, the delivery services would get royally pissed about having these pass through their system.
posted by five fresh fish at 11:32 PM on January 7, 2004

BTW, Lee Valley Tools sells spherical magnets.
posted by five fresh fish at 11:34 PM on January 7, 2004

Slater, it's been a good long while since nickels were made of Nickel, and I believe pennies are currently made of copper-clad aluminum. Anyhow, all US money is non-ferrous, and is just as unaffected by magnetic forces as a houseplant (which is to say, almost entirely).

Seriously though, try putting one of the huge disk magnets to your head above your ear and try to do calculus. I dare you.

(The above trick works better if you already think you know calculus better than you do.)
posted by kfury at 11:49 PM on January 7, 2004

Shamless self link about magnets at my how to fix your magnet messed up monitor page.
posted by woil at 1:49 AM on January 8, 2004

Once at a friends house, we were sitting in his computer room taking apart an old 5 1/2 inch SCSI drive to get at the sweet sweet magnets within. After it was disassembled, he was idly flipping one magnet in his fingers. I notice that one monitor 5 feet away was absolutely freaking out from the field. As of that moment he instituted the rule that no magnet discharged from active disk drive service shall be anywhere near the computer room.

Took a few minutes for the monitor to lose the color stains too.
posted by bunnytricks at 2:07 AM on January 8, 2004

woil: thanx for the link! the corner of my tv in the computer room looks like that and i was never sure why. i bet i left a HD there for too long and too close. i'm going to try your magnet trick. thanx.
posted by suprfli at 2:34 AM on January 8, 2004

Anyone know how they ship these things? It seems like shipment would present /interesting/ issues.
posted by rudyfink at 3:16 AM on January 8, 2004

These disks are incredibly dangerous to handle. They are strong enough to break fingers if they are allowed to come together with their full force.

Fun stuff.
posted by bclark at 3:45 AM on January 8, 2004

If I ever decide to resign from my current job, I just might walk through the rack room with one of those #25s in my pocket so I can watch the fun.
posted by alumshubby at 4:15 AM on January 8, 2004

Hang your bike? People still have steel bikes? HUh?
posted by ParisParamus at 4:24 AM on January 8, 2004

Actually pennies are made from copper clad zinc --- neither of which are attracted by magnets.
posted by nathan_teske at 4:27 AM on January 8, 2004

I've got 100 small ones on my fridge. There are a few neat not immediately intuitive things you can do with them and really screw up the minds of youngsters and oldsters alike.

First, get a copper tube that has a slightly larger inside diameter than your magnet. The copper tube isn't magnetic obviously, stick the magnet to it and it'll just fall off as you'd expect. Now drop the magnet through the tube, it'll slowly drift down the center of the tube. This was a question on an electromagnetics course back in undergrad engineering. At the time you couldn't get a magnet powerful enough to do this on the open market. Now they're 50 cents :P

I've done the same thing with an aluminum heat sink I pulled out of an old CD player (I had the very first CD player on the market which now, if it were in one piece, is of less quality than a 100 dollar CD player)
Drop the magnet between the fins and it leisurely drifts down.

Next get an aluminum sheet of some thickness or maybe a piece of printed circuit board. Put it up on an incline and roll the magnet down it next to a marble. The magnet will roll more slowly.

eBay is a great place to get these things very inexpensively.
posted by substrate at 4:47 AM on January 8, 2004

I have a collection of washers and dryers cluttering up my back yard.

They are made of mild steel.

Maybe I can clean up by using the super-magnets to hang these machines from the trees.
posted by troutfishing at 5:55 AM on January 8, 2004

kfury OK, I'll bite: What's a Magnet Trip like?
posted by aeschenkarnos at 6:00 AM on January 8, 2004

I've satisfied my magnetic needs at wondermagnets.com.
posted by skryche at 6:06 AM on January 8, 2004

I have a bunch of the circular magnets from Lee Valley Tools and they're impressively strong. A magnet that is 3/8" in diameter and 1/10" thick will hold 16 pieces of 8 1/2" x 11" of paper to a magnetic surface. My dad uses one of the larger ones to hold his spare car key in a plastic box underneath his car.
posted by KathyK at 6:08 AM on January 8, 2004

These extra large disks are dangerously strong... These magnets are extremely powerful. Remember Neodymium Magnets have the strongest magnetic force of all permanent magnets. Handle them with care. Enjoy the endless possibilities made available by the power of Gaussboys Super Magnets.

Yes. The endless possibilities... for EVIL!!!!
posted by jennyb at 6:19 AM on January 8, 2004

I got two of these from the recent Buy My Damn Magnets sale by Mark Allen. One of the first things I ended up doing is getting my right palm's skin and flesh get pinched by the two magnets as they flew out of my hands, and get stuck to each other.

My palm's got this nastly little pinched spot, that's got dead blood and tissue, and surrounded by swelling. As for the magnets, it took a group effort, three screwdrivers, and a hammer to split them apart.

quonsar's referring to my experience with them above.
posted by riffola at 6:44 AM on January 8, 2004

Great stuff, MarkO!
posted by carter at 7:24 AM on January 8, 2004

I bet I could build a simple MagLev train with my LEGO Mindstorms kit. Hmmmm.
posted by kahboom at 7:45 AM on January 8, 2004

Canadian nickels have enough actual nickel content to be magnetic.
Old microwaves are a great source for large powerful magnets.
posted by TimeFactor at 8:31 AM on January 8, 2004

I've used Rare Earth Magnets to make jewelry
http://www.magballs.com
posted by jeffbellamy at 8:52 AM on January 8, 2004

Everyone needs to order some of these magnets. Until you've handled them, you've no idea what you're missing.

If you take a stack of about five of 'em, you can do weird and wonderful things with water. Water is anti-magnetic: it is actually repelled by magnetic fields.

Drop the stack into a shallow bowl. Start adding water, very slowly and without creating a lot of motion. You'll find the water can get a good 1/4" above the magnets -- effectively, a "hole" in the water. Let the water flow over the magnets, and start removing water; when it's about 2mm deep over the magnets, you'll see a depression where the water is pushed away. Very cool.

Helps to have the bowl positioned so that it's reflecting something with a straight line, ie. a windowframe. As you pan your head back and forth, you can see the reflection distort over the magnets.
posted by five fresh fish at 9:30 AM on January 8, 2004

What a horribly irresponsible idea, JeffBellamy. Anyone wearing one of your "jewelry" pieces is demagnetizing every credit card within a few feet of their wrist.
posted by five fresh fish at 9:33 AM on January 8, 2004

Hang your bike? People still have steel bikes? HUh?

Umm... No. Preschoolers don't do there finger paintings on steel sheets either, but miraculously they still stick to the steel refrigerator door with a magnet.
posted by badstone at 10:22 AM on January 8, 2004

pennies are made from copper clad zinc

Which is why they tell you to swallow a penny whenever you feel a cold coming on.
posted by kindall at 11:10 AM on January 8, 2004

Good god. Money is liberally coated with all sorts of germy shit. Eating pennies might make you healthier only by introducing your system to every infectious agent known to mankind in quantities hopefully too low to actually kill you.
posted by five fresh fish at 12:25 PM on January 8, 2004

Obviously, this not being AskMeFi, I was joking. You're supposed to take zinc, and pennies are made of zinc, so...
posted by kindall at 1:03 PM on January 8, 2004

Steel is real baby.
posted by rotifer at 4:24 PM on January 8, 2004

People believe in homeopathics, kindall, so penny-swallowing doesn't seem like too far a stretch. Thank goodness you were joking.
posted by five fresh fish at 5:35 PM on January 8, 2004

Money is liberally coated with all sorts of germy shit.

This is why you should take your dirty money to a coin laundry.
posted by SPrintF at 6:54 PM on January 8, 2004

What is this, magnetfilter?

I find myself curiously attracted to this thread.
posted by jeffbarr at 10:44 PM on January 8, 2004