With the cold winter looming ahead, thoughts of interesting indoor activities begin swirling in my head. Usually, magnets come into play simply because of the uncannily magical qualities of magnetism.
Of course, there is a market for magnets that goes far beyond those cute little things stuck to your fridge. You can purchase incredibly strong and incredibly dangerous ones. Or, you can sit back and watch videos of other people, such as Brian, as they explore this fascinating magnetic world.
Here’s an interesting comparison of the strengths of different magnets in his collection.
The smashing force of magnets is something that you shouldn’t underestimate. Even fairly small ones can slam together with many pounds of force causing considerable damage. You can not only suffer from pulverized bones, but they can rip skin from bone as well. When dealing with larger magnets there are best practices to consider, and even special tools!
Consider for a moment how you would even ship a magnet that can pull heavy objects from meters away.
And then there’s storage. You don’t want two extremely strong magnets loose where they could accidentally collide, so you join them together with a spacer. This has to be done extremely carefully though, or your hand becomes the spacer!
Once you join them, you can’t simply pull them apart. Brian shows how he has constructed a special tool simply for that purpose.
You can’t have a bunch of magnets in the house without wondering what they would do to your electronics. Most of us have been told to keep anything magnetic far way from computers, and for good reason. Watch what happens when this old computer goes up against a giant magnet!
He revisited this experiment with a more modern laptop. As you can see, once the hard drive is replaced with an SSD, it is much less susceptible to magnetic damage.
After seeing all this fun, you may be inclined to get your hands on your own set of fancy magnets. Here is some background on how they’re measured and what constitutes a good beginner kit.
There are actually several more entrancing videos on his channel. He tests various elements to see how they react to magnets and even does some fun eddy current experiments.
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