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Homemade Gauss Gun
bonzoesc writes: "I'm sure we all remember getting owned by some railgun-wielding kid in Quake2. Ever wanted a way to get back? Enter the Homemade Gauss Rifle. Requires wooden ruler with groove down the middle to serve as the rail, steel balls that can roll down the groove to use as projectiles, and magnets to store and redirect energy. Physics is fun!"
Wow, this is exceptionally clever. The only other gauss rifles I've seen talked about used electromagnets and big-ass power.
It makes me wonder... could this scale? What if you built a big version with, say, 50 pound explosive charges (delayed fuse, of course) and big magnets? It seems like with enough phases, you could make a pretty devastating launcher. And I bet it would be pretty damn accurate, too.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Some kid will make the gauss gun,...authorities will find out about it, and claim that he was going to use it to shoot up some kids at school.. it will be taken as further evidence that Computer games (Quake) cause violence in children... yadda yadda yadda...
- Tempestdata
From what I understand, this gun is basically the same thing as the "Newton's Pendulum" toy that clacks back and forth, but with the addition of magnets between the balls, and some distance, to cause the balls to all pick up speed so that the last one gets a lot of kinetic energy transferred to it.
Scaling it up would seem feasible, but the problem would be the shattering magnets, as well as to "reload" you would have to physically move each ball back to the starting point.
Here is where I wonder if this thing could be made "better". The problem is getting a magnet as strong as the ones used, but doesn't shatter - but I think it can be done...
Get a non-ferrous tube - an alluminium or piece of PVC pipe would do fine. Get it with an inside diameter just smaller than the ball you want to fire.
Now, wind up some "double ended" electromagnets - use very fine magnet wire, and do an excelllent job winding the magnets. Use a steel core, and wind them to the thickness of the inside diameter of the tubing. You need these electromagnets to be really strong.
Now, cut 1.5 or 2 inch lengths of the tube - put the magnet on one end, and a ball - secure the magnets extremely well. Then, "stack" the tubes together to make a long tube, so that there is a magnet and a ball between the two magnets.
One end (the "breech") leave a 3 inch piece of tube, and build some kind of "firing mechanism" (spring loaded or something to propel the ball against the first electromagnet). Do the same on the other end, but just the tube - no firing mechanism - you may want this end to be a little longer.
To load and fire:
Get a real big-ass current capacity power supply, and hook the magnets up to turn them on. Don't turn them on yet - tilt the tube up to cause all the other balls to fall to the magnets, then turn on the magnets. Load the ball on the front end (the firing chamber end), and a ball into the firing mechanism. Fire the ball - and, if everything goes right (and my back of the napkin calcs are correct - yeah right), it should do the same thing as the small version, only more powerful (maybe), and reloadable!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Instructions to build a gun that shoots a magnet at 2KM/second. Yes you read correctly. Get a 3 meter long pipe made of pure iron. Coil 400km of thin copper wire around it. Buy a cylindrical magnet, the strongest you can get, that fits inside the pipe. Buy the fattest AC/DC converter around (or build it yourself...) and plug it in a 5000 Volt power supply (think neighbourhood electrical supply). Connect this to the 2 ends of the wires around the pipe.
Oh ya, make sure it's pointing the right way around.
My physics teacher did this while he was in university. They shot a concrete wall 2 feet thick and the magnet went through. The velocity was 2KM/s.
Imperium et libertas
Autocracy and freedom
When I read the title, I couldn't help thinking about burned spot in one of my old dorm's carpeting. A classmate of mine build a small rail gun using electromagnets, unfortunately during a test the coils melted, which left a very interesting splotch of solidified metal and burnt carpet.
The navy has a degaussing station near Norfolk Naval base (and probably others near big bases). They use it to degauss entire ships. The ships, being predominately steel, pick up residual magnetic fields from sailing though the earth's magnetic field. They need to periodically remove these residual fields. They float the ship in, then connect big cables over top of the vessel, and send big currents through the coils. Not sure how it affects internal equipment, but I suppose that the hull shields most of it the same way the shielding in your computer speakers prevents the voice coil magnets from screwing up your monitor.
If you have an old color monitor you don't care about, put a magnet near the screen sometime. (ooh, a rainbow!) As this falls in the same category of fun as microwaving CDs, don't expect the degaussing circuits to fix the result anytime soon. in other words, don't do this to a monitor you wanna use.
-- Don't call me "Sir," I increase entropy for a living!
Not quite. The magnets create a magnetic "force field". As you recall from physics 101, energy is defined is force times the delta of distance, not force alone. The energy of separating the magnets is not 'released' during this experiement, as the magnets do not move. Thus, the energy comes from your hand placing the balls which move.
Gravity also does not impart energy to falling objects; the objects already have energy relative to the earth, and actually lose energy to the earth on impact.
I'm not sure if this is true or not, but I heard you could manually degauss monitors with a magnet by going in circular motions from the center and working your way outward.
So if you have an old color monitor that's messed up, you just may be able to fix it. Of course, keep the magnets away from your RAID 0+1 array...