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.

Constant of proportionality from equation

Worked example: Calculating partial pressures | AP Chemistry | Khan Academy

View All

Multiplication and division relationship for fractions

You are likely already familiar with the relationship between multiplication and division. For example, we know that three times six is equal to eighteen. But another way to express that same relationship is to say, “All right, if 3 times 6 is 18, then i…

Lecture 20 - Later-stage Advice (Sam Altman)

Yeah, all right, all right. Uh, good afternoon and welcome to the last class of how to start a startup. So this is a little bit different than every other class. Every other class has been things that you should be thinking about in general at the beginni…

Private jet expert destroys noob!

So, I’ve always wondered how much you need to be making to comfortably own a private jet. This 20-year-old Citation X will run you $5.8 million and carries eight passengers. Okay, so this is not a Citation X. That’s the first. This guy doesn’t know what …

Naval Ravikant - 11 Rules For Life (Genius Rules)

If you find a mountain and you start climbing, you spend your whole life climbing it, and you get, say, two-thirds of the way; and then you see the peak is like way up there. But you’re two-thirds of the way up. You’re still really high up, but to go the …

This Particle Breaks Time Symmetry

Most processes in our universe are time reversible. In other words, the physics works the same way forwards or backwards. Which is why you can’t tell if I’m playing these videos normally or in reverse. People typically point to entropy as the only excepti…

Feedback

So now I want to talk a little bit about the concept of feedback. This is a really important concept. It was developed in the 1920s, the idea of using feedback, and it was done at Bell Labs, Bell Telephone Laboratories. Remember we talked about this on th…

I Made A Solenoid Engine!

More Articles