On Thu, 08 Oct 2009 14:04:33 -0700, the infamous Winston
scrawled the following:

wrote:

(...)

And steel is 99.9-99% iron.

I DAGS on 'iron wire' and 'steel wire'; came up with bupkis.

It's the little details that will get
you. My old, OLD electrical how-to from the teens and twenties shows
them using iron, not steel, wire for solenoid cores. The reason being
is that soft iron, not steel, wire will have little or no remaining
field once the current is turned off. You want it magnetized only
when the current is on. And eddy currents are only there if you're
running AC through it, which sounds like some kind of choke, if that's
what you're doing.

Yup. A.C. electromagnet is what I'm building.

You're going to snatch those Big Wheels right out from under those
noisyarse little bitty bastids, aren't you? Excellent!

ENGAGE!


In which case you might want to rethink your
choice of magnetic core.

I'd really like some enamel insulated iron wire, but none of my sources
carries it. I have a query into a supplier of ferromagnetic tape suggested
by Kevin Gallimore but I'm concerned that they deal in much larger
quantities than I need. I'm not expecting a response from them.

MIG wire is the nearest thing available.

Suggestions?

Try www.Mouser.com . They used to provide -anything- in hardware to us
when I worked at Southcom. (No, not the military one. SCI, which was
snatched by Loral in the late '70s)


At 60 Hz or so you can salvage the silcon
iron out of old transformer cores.

Not really. This is a 10" long part. I'm not going to spend a
few hundred dollars for transformers to disassemble.

Um, you're really building yourself a ten-incher? Crikey! Your sales
will go into the millions within weeks if it works. And women;
there'll be lots and lots of women. bseg

--
Adults are obsolete children. --Dr. Seuss (Theodore Geisel, 1904-1991)
--