Homemade Electric Motor

Over the course of 5 weeks, including over 24 hours of work, I made an electric motor with a couple nails, magnet wire, iron straps, copper, tape, lamp wire, screws, and a piece of wood. The motor’s ultimate goal was to pull a Matchbox car, in which it will attempt to do on Wednesday, January 24^th. In my trials, the motor has spun at speeds between 10 rotations per second, and spinning fast enough that I was not able to count rotations.

            To build the motor, I first had to build the base magnet. I bent an iron strap into a U shape and wrapped 400 rotations of magnet wire around the base. Next, I took an iron rod and cut it to be 6 inches long. After that, I taped 2 nails cut to be 2.5 inches around the rod. I then wrapped 4 layers of wire around the two nails. This would be the armature. Next, I created a commutator out of tape and pieces of metal I had. After that, I soldered the ends of the wire from the armature onto the commutator. Finally, I assembled it.

            Once assembled, I created brushes out of lamp wire and attached them to the battery and the wire from the base magnet. When I started up the motor, it didn’t work the first time, the second time, or even the third time. 

            When troubleshooting, I replaced the brushes, commutator, rewrapped the base magnet, and completely disassembled and later reassembled the entire project, until the motor spun.

Eventually, the motor finally worked, and for a while, it was fine. However, when I tried to test the motor with a car, the motor ceased to spin, even before I attached the car. At this point, I redid the commutator and redid the brushes. After this, the motor still wouldn’t spin, so I reset the polarization of the magnetic fields with the battery and wire. After I did this, the motor worked.

            During tests with a model car significantly heavier than what I will be competing with, the motor took 8 seconds to pull a car 4 meters with friction and other detrimental factors that will be eliminated in Breuckner Hall. I predict that my motor will pull the car 4 meters between 2 and 4 seconds.