| Author | Message | ||
     Rick Vicars Unregistered guest |
How do you make one power full enough to shoot at a target, say 50 feet away. | ||
| marusushi Unregistered guest |
Use a lot of magnets. | ||
| Dan Stone Unregistered guest |
I built a gun that would shoot about 15 feet using 3/8" dia steel ball bearings and 1/2" dia X approx. 5/8" long cylindrical neodymium magnets. It had 4 stages. My magnets were simply scotch taped to an aluminum c-channel rail. For your needs, the first consideration should be to fix the magnets to your rail as rigidly as possible. Also, the entire apperatus should be rigidly fixed to avoid energy loss through recoil. Try to get some neodymium cylindrical magnets around 3/4" diameter and at least as long; perhaps 5 of them. I would recommend using a 3/8" steel ball bearing as the projectile. It may require some ingenuity, and perhaps some machining to manufacture a rigid apparatus, but 50 feet seems to me a pretty attainable distance. Take care! The exit velocity will be extremely dangerous. Also, your magnets--even if coated--WILL crack and break. They may or may not escape destruction on the first shot. Wear goggles, and make sure you aim at nothing! Sounds like a helluva lotta fun! | ||
| Simon Quellen Field (sfield) New member Username: sfield Post Number: 172 Registered: 12-2004 |
The force transmitted to the balls will be at a maximum if the balls and the magnets have the same mass, and if the balls hit the center of the magnets. This is why we sell the balls and magnets that we do, since they are pretty close to perfect when the grooved ruler is used. Using aluminum will cause some extra losses due to eddy currents in the metal. Wood is thus preferred. The 3/8ths inch ball will not hit the 1/2 inch magnet in the center, and you will thus not get the best energy transfer. If the mass of the ball is the same as the mass of the magnet, the magnet will not move. This is the same as hitting a row of billiard balls with the cue ball -- only the last ball will move. Thus, if the balls and the magnets are well matched, you will only need a little bit of tape to keep the magnets from jumping together. | ||
| lysdexia Unregistered guest |
powerful apparatus A flaw in this mechanical engineering thinking is that the elements do not know what masses each and every are: They only respond to forces outside them, and from those the designer assumes or misassumes a respective mass, which only corresponds to an effective mass determined by how well the system is bolted down. One can then use a lighter magnet that uses the mass of the rail to stay. Never mind the rail, you can just tape the magnets to a flat surface in whatever configuration you like. But try making a bunch of cardboard discs, taping a series of elements around the edge, cutting out a ramp on each disc, and skewering the discs on a pole as a quasihelical accelerator with a track length only limited by the sky. | ||
| Anonymous |
I don't think lizzard has built one. Listen to Mr. Stone instead. Mr. Field should add a spell checker to the board so that lizzard has time to actually build something. | ||
| anonymous dan (Unregistered Guest) Unregistered guest Posted From: 69.76.113.99 |
The real ones they make have to be 1 mile long if it goes straight and 15 miles in diameter to go in a circle. These are called proton accelorators. it's amazing how much they pick up in speed, it's like it is exponential! NASA used this to test what a grain of sand in space would do to voyager 1 if the craft was going 17,000 miles per second (102,0000 Miles per hour). to design against this they made the craft with puncture-resistant metal lined up like this ||||||| so that when the sand grain came along it did this >/|||| (pretend > is the sand grain). sorry just had to add to this discussion. |
