How do you make a homemade electromagnet (rtfq!)?

Question

I already know that you wrap wire around a nail and close the circuit with a battery. My question is what voltage battery do you use and what gauge wire? I need numbers!

Thanks,

I am familiar with Ohm's law, but that doesn't tell me how strong the magnetic field will be now does it? I don't want to calculate resistance and all that feces. I'm sure someone has already done this and I want to know how they did it.

Wtf, over.

Answer 1

"Today we tried making electromagnets. It was load of fun! We used a D cell battery, a 3 1/2" nail (not galvanized) and some 20 gauge solid core wire. All you have to do is strip about 1" off of each end of the wire and coil it around the nail. After that you tape one end of the stripped wire to one end of the battery and touch the other stripped end of the wire to the other end of the battery. Voila! An electromagnet. Here's what it looked like."

http://ktcatspost.blogspot.com/2007/01/homemade-electromagnet-project.html

Answer 2

My dad used to work at a particle physics magnet company with a pretty high position, I Know a thing or 2 about electromagnets:

any voltage and amperage battery can be used, but the higher the overall wattage the stronger the ElectroMagnet.

You just need to make a consistent coil of loops of wire around anything, my dad's electromagnets were held together by plastic resins and had nothing in the middle, no nails or anything, the wire size is dependent on how much wattage you want to pass through the wire, the more loops the better, and it can be any round shape, from nascar track shapes to circles to perfect ovals, it doesn't matter but it affects the waves of electromagnetism... hint, don't do it too closely to nearby electronic devices especially floppy disks and sensitive circuits (if the power is high enough) ...
I'd say any size wire is fine depending on what you want to do with it, just so long as you don't have a CAR BATTERY attached to single strand wires. Good luck and have fun.

Answer 3

This website has detailed instructions on how to make a homemade electromagnet
http://www.physics.ucsb.edu/~circus/demos/electromagnet.html

Answer 4

utff aka please read up on Ohm's law and learn how to use it.

Good luck!