@Fender1325, it’s really pretty easy, but you end up with a screw driver that everything wants to stick to. So don’t go having too much fun and magnetizing them all.
I had a client ask me one day if I had anything that he could cut some wire with. I handed him my shoe pullers http://www.centaurforge.com/GE-14-Pull-Offs/productinfo/GEPULL14/ because they are more than sharp enough.
Turned out it was electrical wires on a car and the guy magnetized the tool on me when he cut the live wires. The problem is that try to catch the little 3/8 inch tip of horseshoe nail when we wring them off and toss them into our tool box.
Those little tips would always stick to the pulloffs and right in the stop…that keeps the blades from touching.
So I had a fellow who told me how to demagnetize them too.
If anyone is interested, I’ll post something tomorrow on haw to do it.
I’ll have to figure out how to post pictures first.
I wonder if it's the nickel in the 300's ??????????????
Nay metallurgists or physicists in the room?
Pure nickel is magnetic, so is cobalt and iron.
Wanna amaze the others in the shop? Take a regular iron nail, heat it red hot with a torch, and challenge someone to pick it up with a magnet while it’s red hot.
Once it cools off, it becomes magnetic again, but while it’s red hot, it may as well be brass as far as a magnet is concerned.
The temperature at which a metal loses its magnetic properties is called the Currie temperature.
According to A History of Engineering and Science in the Bell System: The Early Years (1875-1925):
Starting in 1913 Bell Labs did intensive research on iron alloys and their magnetic properties for their telephone transformers and coils.
First just nickel, then 3-way alloys with silicon, chrominum, manganese, antimony, copper, tungsten.
Also heat treatment.
1913-1935 were the “golden” years; Bell claimed creativity unmatched anywhere else in the world.
Thanks to everybody for the very magnetic comments. I tried what @PvtPublic suggested, pulling the screwdriver through the hole in the magnet. But I couldn’t fit the entire driver in the hole, only the shaft, so I had to push it in, the pull it out. Maybe that doesn’t accomplish anything, magnetizes, the de-magnetizes in other words. Also it seems like the magnet polarity has to be in the right direction too for that to work well; i.e. if it is coin shaped, heads is north and tails is south. Not all coin magnets are polarized in that direction. Some are polarized along the diameter, the right side north, and the left side is south etc. I expect if you want to magnetize something with that type of magnet you need to pull the object along the face, not through the hole.
I’ve magnetized things like nails and paper clips using a DC power supply before, but never using a battery like @missleman suggests. I need some horseshoe shaped magnets on hand for projects sometimes. For some reason horseshoe shaped magnets are hard to come by these days, so I’ll give that battery idea a try next time I have an old car battery on hand and some rebar. I don’t understand @B.L.E. 's idea of using a soldering gun loop. Do you mean BLE to make a loop in the wire going to the solder gun tip? Even if that is DC current, wouldn’t that wire have current going in both directions so the magnetic fields would cancel? Unsure what you mean.
I did solve my magnetizing problem finally, thanks to what I learned here. I now have a way that works very well. I used @Bing 's and @Barkydog 's very simple-to-do idea of just attaching an actual magnet right to the screwdriver. This particular screwdriver I need magnetized is very small, so I used a tiny neodymium magnet I had, 3 mm diameter, about the size of a watch battery for a small watch, stuck it right to the screwdriver shaft, worked like charm! I’m going to leave it stuck on there a few days, maybe the screwdriver will become semi-permanently magnetized.
Ok, getting thirsty, need to fruitify with a glass of fresh squozen orange juice
This is slightly off-topic but a friend showed me a novelty trick with a screwdriver some years ago.
The screwdriver was a common about 8" long with a pretty much flat end on the handle.
He held the screwdriver up about head high and handle up, pointed an air blowgun at the end of the handle, and allowed the air to blast it at about a 45 degree angle.
He released his hold on it and the screwdriver would just hang there in mid-air on it’s own. It could be poked with a fingertip which would cause it to waggle around but otherwise would stay stationary and hovering as long as the air was blowing over the handle.
Pretty amazing what a tiny low pressure area can accomplish.
@GeorgeSanJose Thanks for the recognition, glad it worked for you. I don’t know that the magnetism will stick, but the magnets do not go far from where you leave them.
I don't understand @B.L.E. 's idea of using a soldering gun loop. Do you mean BLE to make a loop in the wire going to the solder gun tip? Even if that is DC current, wouldn't that wire have current going in both directions so the magnetic fields would cancel? Unsure what you mean.
You use the soldering gun to de-magnetize a screwdriver that you don’t want magnetized. I’m talking about the “guns” not the irons. A Weller soldering gun is nothing but a stepdown transformer with a single turn for the secondary, very low voltage and hundreds of amps. It’s alternating current so the polarity constantly switches. You put the magnetized screwdriver inside the soldering tip loop, turn on the gun, and while the gun is on, slowly pull the screwdriver out of the alternating magnetic field generated by the tip. You will have a completely de-magnetized screwdriver.
The degaussing coils in a color tv worked the same way. A loop of many turns of wire surrounding the picture tube was energized when the tv was turned on, there was a temperature dependent resistor in series with the wire and as the resistor got hot, it slowly ramped down the ac current leaving the picture tube’s iron shadow mask free of residual magnetism.
Any residual magnetism in that shadow mask deflects the electron beams and caused them to hit the wrong color phosphor dots making for color impurity. People changing color on one end of the screen and other such undesirable things.
Ok, I understand BLE now. Soldering “guns” – unlike soldering “irons” – have that loop at the working end, so yes, I understand what you mean now, indeed inside the loop there’d be a significant alternating magnetic field, and that seems like it would work pretty good at de-magnetizing.
If you shut off the soldering gun while the screwdriver is still in the loop it’s possible to magnetize it.
Strength depends where on the AC waveform the current is shut off.
Besides the degaussers for CRT’s there are units for erasing tapes (Nixon coulda used one) and tape heads.
@circuitsmith
If you shut off the soldering gun while the screwdriver is still in the loop it's possible to magnetize it.
Strength depends where on the AC waveform the current is shut off.
That is correct, which is why I also said to slowly pull the screwdriver out of the loop and wait until the screwdriver is far away from the soldering gun before turning it off. Unless of course, you would rather use a Variac to slowly ramp down the AC voltage to the soldering gun. Not everyone has a Variac handy though so slowly removing the screwdriver while the soldering gun is on is the more practical option.
I have done this frequently when I wanted a totally demagnetized screwdriver. There are situations where a magnetized screwdriver is a nuisance rather than a help.
@B.L.E. I wasn’t disagreeing with you.
Just pointing out that a soldering gun, degausser etc. can serve a dual function.
Back when I was working in TV shops once a tech had a dispute with a deadbeat customer who wanted their color tv back “unrepaired”, so the tech shut off the degausser coil with it next to the screen, along with disconnecting the internal degausser.
This left it with a psychadelic color scheme.
What never fails to magnetize: Take a rare-earth (neodymium) magnet and rub it along the screwdriver, always in the same direction, like you were sharpening a knife. (trying to describe the process with a minimum of innuendos) This has never failed, and usually the driver ends up more magnetized than one you buy already magnetized.
You can buy a magnet like this, or just salvage them from dead hard drives. They have all kinds of uses. Need to stick a (small) phone book to your refrigerator? One of these will do it. Our facilities guy at work uses one I gave him to stick a half-inch thick instruction manual to the building’s alarm control panel. I use one to stick a “church key” style bottle opener to the side of my fridge. As a result, the opener is so magnetized that bottle caps stick to it strongly.
I have salvaged a few of those magnets from hard drives. They are so strong, I’ve gotten my fingers pinched more than once putting one back on the side of the tool box. Ouch!!! Then I need a screw driver to pry it back off next time.
I work with computer so I tend to stay away from anything magnetic. A glue stick works great, a small amount on the end of the driver and it’ll stick to the screw or nut long enough to get it started.
