"Half-Nutz" wrote in message
ups.com...
On Oct 10, 8:33 am, "Joe AutoDrill" wrote:
I wish I still had the two gigantic 12 meg hard drives I picked up in the
80's... 36" long by about 24" wide and about 10-12" thick... I'm sure
there were possibly some huge magnets in there...

--

Regards,
Joe Agro, Jr.
(800) 871-5022
01.908.542.0244
Automatic / Pneumatic Drills:http://www.AutoDrill.com
Multiple Spindle Drills:http://www.Multi-Drill.com

V8013-R

"Ernie Sty" wrote in message

...



A guy I know bid on an old non-working hard drive. It was big,
something
like ten inches by maybe 18 inches by three inches. I asked him why he
wanted it, and he said he'd show me.

A few days later, the display on my CRT started wobbling. The guy was
holding a magnet a good six feet away from my monitor and rotating it
slightly. Needless to say, he got it out of the hard drive. He had to
use a ball joint separator to get the two magnets apart. Each one was
about the size of two decks of cards, if I recall correctly.

I never found out what the strength of those magnets was. He soon made
the mistake of holding one in each hand. They got too close together
and
in a split second they had collided, nipping off a little of the skin
from
his fingers in the process. I figure he's really lucky that's all that
happened. I can think of a number of ways it could have been worse.

He brought in the now-stuck-together magnets and surprisingly (to me,
anyway) their magnetic pull for other objects was very weak, like they
were each absorbing the magnetism of the other. I asked if he was
going
to try to separate them, and he said no, and showed me that they were
both
cracked.

I think he was, too, a little.

Anyway, that's all the experience I've had with what were to me
monstrously powerful magnets.- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

I still have a head positioning magnet from a disk drive from the
original Cray1.
The drive was as big as a couple washing machines, and ran on 208V
three phase.
The drive magnets were about 12" X 10" X 10" in a cube.


Good flerking squeeb! How strong is it? Toss it in a car the car would
probably collapse in around it... Sheesh! And you still have it? How much
would something like that run for? And what on earth can you do with it
other than keep magnetic stuff way away from it?