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!"

Comments

so, you people want to build a gun eh?

[SevenTowers]

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.

At least it doesn't melt.

[dragons_flight]

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.

Re:Degaussing gun

[SgtXaos]

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.