In article ,
Jon Haugsand wrote:
* R. H.

[ ... ]

If anybody wants to make one, it works best with very thin wire.

Amazing! This /is/ something to impress today's kids with, because
they are used to that you have to buy things from the computer store
or whatever. But here you can pretend to just find some wire, a used
battery and so on. Need to try this. The wire is something I don't
have in-house, so I'll need to figure out which store stocks such
items.

If you have an old (and preferably dead) wall wart (the
oversized lump on the end of power cords for lots of portable things
which plugs directly into the wall), they normally have a small power
transformer inside. You can recover a lot of wire from one of those --
in two gauges. The finer wire would be wound closer to the center, and
connected to the power line, while the slightly coarser wire (probably
better for this task) is wound on the outside to produce a low-voltage
secondary to power the device -- whatever is is.

Enjoy,
DoN.
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