![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I'm hungry. Why? Because of the rather pervasive smell of burnt vegetable oil. Why is that smell in the air? Because I'm up late and bored.
...and jealous of my partner in crime's recent acquisition of ferrofluid, with which I have yet to be able to play. So I decided to whip up some much inferior magnetorheological paste using iron filings and vegetable oil. Which was kind of cool, but (no jokes please) I was hoping for something that got much harder. So I put it in a plastic bag, mushed it into a rough tube, wrapped wire around it, and hooked it up to a power supply. The idea being that the magnetic field inside an electromagnet is far stronger than it is outside, so I'd make the MRF itself the core. Which might have worked well had I bothered to think it all out first. Instead, it being 3 in the morning, I flipped the switch. The far-too-thin wire did some quick resistance calculations and decided its role in life was to become a twisty little heating element. *poof* The insulation burned off in the first few milliseconds, leaving a glowing lasso around the oily, metallic goop. I managed to turn the power supply off before the baggie melted through in more than a couple dozen places, but the odor remains.
So finally, after cleaning everything up and managing to salvage most of the MRF, I'm hungry. I guess I'll go eat something.
...and jealous of my partner in crime's recent acquisition of ferrofluid, with which I have yet to be able to play. So I decided to whip up some much inferior magnetorheological paste using iron filings and vegetable oil. Which was kind of cool, but (no jokes please) I was hoping for something that got much harder. So I put it in a plastic bag, mushed it into a rough tube, wrapped wire around it, and hooked it up to a power supply. The idea being that the magnetic field inside an electromagnet is far stronger than it is outside, so I'd make the MRF itself the core. Which might have worked well had I bothered to think it all out first. Instead, it being 3 in the morning, I flipped the switch. The far-too-thin wire did some quick resistance calculations and decided its role in life was to become a twisty little heating element. *poof* The insulation burned off in the first few milliseconds, leaving a glowing lasso around the oily, metallic goop. I managed to turn the power supply off before the baggie melted through in more than a couple dozen places, but the odor remains.
So finally, after cleaning everything up and managing to salvage most of the MRF, I'm hungry. I guess I'll go eat something.