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Magnet Diorama Fun

I recently inherited some neodymium magnets from a former coworker that left for greener pastures. The magnets are super strong for their size and fun to play with.

I plan to use some of them to make hand wound humbucking pickups, but that won't be for some time. In the meantime, I found some uses for the magnets besides just sticking to my desk's overhead compartments. I made the hanging compass, now I know where north is from my cubicle. Then I tried the levitating paperclip attached to string, that was cool.

After awhile, the floating paperclip just looked like the office supplies on my desk except that it was off my desk. I figured, why not disguise the paperclip. I made a kite cutout of paper and affixed it to the paper clip. This didn't work out too good because the kite did not look like how a kite would naturally fly. I then switched the paper clip with another magnet and was able to adjust the placement of the magnet to make the kite look as if it was really flying. This added a nice touch to my desk decor.

I found that if I hung another magnet to the overhead cabinet to increase the area of the magnetic field,. I could position the kite in a sweet spot where the kite would easily sway from magnet to magnet if I decided to blow on the kite. The effect looks pretty cool. A nice bonus to this is that the kite moves when people walk a good 5ft or so from my cubicle entrance; motion sensor of sort. The movement of the kite alerts me and gives me enough time for me to alt-tab back to work.

I can't take photos of my desk space at work, so the pictures below are an example setup on my wife's desk at home. New touches to the original idea are to cover the top magnets with pictures of clouds, use a box kite in place of the standard diamond kite, and a little figurine to hold the line instead of my stapler.



A future improvement would be to move the kite magnet to inside of the kite for a clean look. For now, the placement in the back doesn't distract from the scene.

Plans for next iteration of scenes, dopero kite, delta kite, ninja flying on a kite, cotton for clouds, ... well that is all I can think of right now.

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