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.

Principles for Success: "Everything is a Machine" | Episode 5

Absolute minima & maxima (entire domain) | AP Calculus AB | Khan Academy

View All

Example exercise using limit flow chart

In a previous video, we introduced this flowchart that helps us think about what strategies to use when trying to determine a limit of a function as it approaches a point. What we’re going to do in this video is now try to apply that in several example ex…

New Hampshire Summer Learning Series Session 5: Writing Coach

All right, good, great! Good morning, everyone. So welcome back to our summer learning series with KH Academy for New Hampshire Educators. Just a reminder that this is part of our summer learning path because we are working to enroll all of you into our p…

Strategies for dividing by tenths

Let’s do a few more examples of thinking of strategies for dividing decimals. In the future, we’re going to come up with a more systematic way of doing it, but it’s really important to come up with some of these strategies because it gives you an intuitio…

Peter Lynch: How to Achieve a 29% Annual Return in the Stock Market

Peter Lynch is definitely someone you should be studying if you want to learn about investing. During his time running the Fidelity Magellan Fund, Lynch averaged a 29.2% annual return, consistently more than double the S&P 500 stock market index, maki…

Review of revenue and cost graphs for a monopoly | Microeconomics | Khan Academy

What I want to do in this video is review a little bit of what we’ve learned about monopolies and in the process get a better understanding for some of the graphical representations which we have talked about in the past. But I want to put it all togethe…

Multi step addition word problem

We’re told that Joe started his math homework. He finished 23 problems by himself. He finished 13 more problems with help from Sal. I don’t know if they’re talking about me or not. And then they say there are nine math problems left. And then they ask us…

I Made A Solenoid Engine!

More Articles