I Made A Solenoid Engine!

less than 1m read

·Nov 10, 2024

I built a solenoid engine. Unlike most motors out there that hide how they work, this beauty bears all. A solenoid is a kind of electromagnet. When electricity flows through this coil, a magnetic field pulls the magnet-topped piston inside up. But when the piston reaches the top, a cam on the axle it’s turning cuts off the flow of electricity, and the flywheel's momentum pulls the piston back down.

But once down, the cam disengages, electrical flow resumes, and the piston goes up again. You can see how it turns electrical energy into rotational energy. To make this happen, my team and I got to design a bunch of custom cross axle compatible parts that I had been wanting for a long time: special cams, pistons, arms, wires, a heavy brass flywheel, and of course, the solenoids themselves.

We even made elliptical gears, Nautilus gears, and a Geneva mechanism. If you’d like to build one yourself and add these parts to your arsenal—too bad, so sad, psych! You can buy one! ABS plastic, ooh, and look at those colors! The first 500 people to use code "I love you Michael" will get 10% off.

How to buy a $25,000,000 private jet!

The 2022 Stock Market Crash: How It Happened And What To Do Next (w/ @The Plain Bagel )

View All

EXCLUSIVE: Confronting an Accused Ivory Smuggler | National Geographic

As part of his ivory trafficking investigation, Brian Christie has led to a small West African port in L Togo where the largest African ivory seizure in over a quarter century was recently discovered by Lieutenant Kier A. One of the men arrested at the sc…

Superheroes MAKING BABIES

[Music] Hey Vsauce, how are you doing? It’s Michael here at the 2010 New York ComiCon, and I’m joined by Ramona. Myself and Rusty are going to be counting down the top superheroes to have a child with. So, I’m going to let you be my first victim. What su…

Cellular evidence of common ancestry | High school biology | Khan Academy

Perhaps the most mind-blowing idea in all of biology is the concept that all living things we know of, based on current evidence that we have, all originated from a common ancestor. So it doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about a simple bacterial cell,…

Exponential and logistic growth in populations | High school biology | Khan Academy

Let’s say that we were starting with a population of 1,000 rabbits, and we know that this population is growing at 10% per month. What I want to do is explore how that population will grow if it’s growing at 10% per month. So, let’s set up a little table …

How The Economic Machine Works: Part 4

Deleveraging in a deleveraging: people cut spending, incomes fall, credit disappears, asset prices drop. Banks get squeezed, the stock market crashes, social tensions rise, and the whole thing starts to feed on itself. The other way, as incomes fall and d…

When Big Oil Owns Your Soil | Parched

California is the third largest oil-producing state in the country. A lot of people don’t realize that. When they think of California, they think of vineyards and Hollywood. But we’ve been living with oil and gas production since the late 19th century. Ke…

I Made A Solenoid Engine!

More Articles