Having designed...

Having designed magnetic equipment, I must also warn you guys to watch your fingers. If you haven't found out yet, RE magents can snap together quickly and pinch your skin if not careful. Also, please wear eye protection, as many RE magnet types are known to be brittle and a sudden attraction may have enough force to cause chips to break off. 

Ok, enough of the nanny state comments. RE magnets are freaking cool aren't they? I have a couple from a previous job. Oh the stories I could tell...

Slow News Day...?

Gee my five year old still isn't shopping online or unsupervised for that matter and where I come from, by five, most kids know better than to put stuff they pick up off the floor/ground in their mouths, let alone swallowing the stuff, or at least mine do.

Thanks for the dire warning all the same.

New Magnets vs amps

Ok, Andy, now I have a question.

Does replacing a pittman magnet with one of yours reduce the amperage draw of the motor much?

(Hidden real question:  can it reduce Athearn motor draw enough to be able to use a DCC decoder?).

Kevin:   

I agree:  our kids were taught about hand to mouth activities at an early age.  Thanks for the warning, Andy.

OT. Button batteries

Really OT but don't forget Button batteries. Those little things are in everything and kids have swallowed them.

Most parents eventually forget that they grew up as a child.

Rich

I measured about 50% running current reduction!

Stall current seemed down too, but I'm not sure about the reason for that. I'll run new tests and re-publish the data in the next few days.  I too need to have DCC with an adequate bemf for decent slow running! I do have identical before and after cars to measure from

Another thing I do is supply a soft iron shim (or shims for custom thickness if needed), with each kit, to close the air gap that you typically get with a fixed height magnet stack. That cuts the flux losses that otherwise flow out of the gap, that degrade the performance well below optimum. Any air gap should not be so large that the magnet stack can just be slid in and out. You can't tighten down very much on ceramic magnets, but you can close the air gap quite well with a shim.

In the case of the Suydam cars, it's not just having a new strong magnet that makes for such a running improvement. There are other parts that I'll be adding to the kits soon to fix some fundamental "old brass" pick-up problems as well

Waitin' for the update

Thanks, Andy.  I'll be waitin' for the new test results.

Oh, how we love those Maxwell equations!!!  Remember, partial differentials are our friends.

New Magnets and Amperage Draw

I just received 3 sets of magnets from Proto and am getting ready to put them into my old motors. I was wondering also about reduced amperage draw and will run some before and after tests on the motors that I upgrade.

When I am talking old motors, I really mean old motors from the 80s and early 90s.

Large magnet story