What Can I HacK to Find Magnets? The POWERFUL the better. Answered

Magnetic name tags *

Magnetic make tags have then glued on the part that goes inside your shirt. I found a bag of them thrown away and spent an hour with a pair of channel locks popping them all off. I ended up with a two ft. tall stack of them. That was years ago and I still find them stuck to stuff to this day

where can I find strong ring magnets......please tell me......I wanna make an magnetic levitative suspension

Hard drives are the best place to find strong magnets. Your average used speaker or motor will have magnets of the ceramic type, with a smaller ratio of strength to weight. It's possible to find neodymium magnets in magnetic toys if you're lucky enough to find some at a yard sale.

However, you might take another look at buying your magnets now. There are a few places you can buy magnets without being charged an arm and a leg. To avoid getting ripped off, be sure to calculate the unit price. The two examples below are fairly reasonable, but some people's prices are ridiculous.

For example...
Say you see some little grade N35 magnets for sale.
Length: 5 mm
Diameter: 12.6 mm
Price: $12 for 25
Shipping: $5

You go to Google and type in this calculation:
(12+5)USD / 25 / (12.6mm/2)~2 / 5mm in USD/cu in
You find out that these magnets cost $56 per cubic inch.

On the other hand...
This other deal sells bigger grade N42 magnets.
Length: 1 in
Diameter: 0.75 in
Price: $14.46 for 6
Shipping: $10.42 (lots of packaging)

(14.46+10.42)USD / 6 / (0.75inch/2)~2 / 1inch in USD/cu in
So $29 per cubic inch.

Also be sure that you choose the right shape for your application. Small thin magnets packed together with poles pointing in alternating directions provide a powerful grip on a thin surface, while one tall cylindrical magnet might be better if you need a deeply penetrating field.

Personaly i destory some magnetic toys, eg. magnetics, geomag etc. the magnets in those are quite powerful and easy to get if you have a knife. Although the problem is they are quite small.

Take the magnet out of a shaker torch. Really strong! About the size of your thumb. I stuck one to the stove and couldnt pull it off straight, had to slide it off.

for the homopolar motors you can see here you can hack the magnets from these cellphone cases with magnetic flaps/locks. i found that some are made of metal and others made of ferrite. they are very powerful., the ferrite, i stacked 7 pieces with aluminum foil and it worked. i found that there are flaps with with 4 magnets which are made of metal. stack 7 pieces of these are and no need for aluminum foil..

If you're just making a simple motor, you don't need super-strong magnets. Try prising the circular ceramic magnets off the back of fridge magnets. Don't bother with the flexible magnets; their fields are too complex to be useful for a motor.

Some of the higher end ear buds have teeny ones, but you have to fight them out, they are normally strongly glued in place. Drew

buy cheap toys with magnets in them from the dollar store

hard drive magnets are powerful especially because of their size (very useful if you're limited by height or don't want something bulky hanging around. Speaker magnets are powerful but bulky... haven't hacked open a microwave yet so would be curious to see them

old microwave each contain two powerful magnets and reuseable copper wire appliance repair stores might have loads of them at little or no cost for non fixable ones

speakers...hard drives...cd drives (towards the laser)....or you can just buy neodymium magnets...

for inexpensive/free try - computer hard drives speakers