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This is a question Home Science

Have you split the atom in your kitchen? Made your own fireworks? Fired a bacon rocket through your window?
We love home science experiments - tell us about your best, preferably with instructions.

Extra points for lost eyebrows / nasal hair / limbs

(, Thu 9 Aug 2012, 17:25)
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Magnets
Earlier stories about dynamos remind me of when I pressured my dad into making me a dynamo. I had collected the magnets from old TVs dumped on waste land - this was the early 70s so the B&W TVs had a pair of circular beam focussing magnets around the neck of the tube. The yoke coils provided the copper wire for the armature windings and he knocked up a neat commutator for it from bits of a tin can using snips. We hooked it up to a torch bulb.

It made perfect sense at the time to have the armature spinning through the hole of the circular magnets with the net result of nothing, zilch not a flicker.

I'll let you figure out why it didn't work and it wasn't the insulation on the wire.

I did get a reputation in the neighbourhood as the boffin and became the go-to guy when dumped telly screens needed a bricking. Very satisfying implosions would result.
(, Tue 14 Aug 2012, 20:15, 5 replies)
The wires were not perpendicular to the flux?

(, Tue 14 Aug 2012, 20:29, closed)
Yep
The Poles of the magnets were their faces and so I would have had to have put them either side of the armature facing each other instead. Still got some in the den - might have another go one day.

Don't know which is sadder me posing this or two b3tans sussing it so quickly.
(, Tue 14 Aug 2012, 20:40, closed)

The net change in potential = 0 ?
(, Tue 14 Aug 2012, 20:32, closed)
You designed it incorrectly?

(, Tue 14 Aug 2012, 21:07, closed)
Taking apart TVs?
Did you discharge the tube beforehand?
(, Wed 15 Aug 2012, 8:33, closed)

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