Barry's Coilgun Design Site

Current projects: Click here to see my latest coilgun, my best coilgun or my levitator.
Also try out my RLC Simulator and Inductor Simulator.

What is a coilgun or gauss gun? It accelerates a piece of iron or steel down a tube. The tube runs through a series of electromagnetic coils (like solenoids). There are no sparks or noise or impressive side effects (or parts to wear out). Some careful timing circuits energize each coil in sequence. The principle of magnetic attraction draws the projectile along at rapidly increasing speed.

Why build a coilgun? It demonstrates many basic concepts of magnetic machines. A coilgun is foremost an example of a solenoid. These appear practically everywhere, from car door locks to doorbells, from diskette drive ejectors to fuel injectors. The only difference is that most solenoids limit the range of travel, and usually have a spring return. A coilgun is also an example of a simple linear motor.

A coilgun is scalable to very large applications, possibly as large as a mass driver to put payloads into orbit. It's a keen space-age toy. It has no moving parts -- there's the magic of invisible forces at work. It requires no special construction techniques or unusual tools. Winding coils is fun and relaxing (at least for the first few!). Even small coils are remarkably powerful.

You can also learn about magnetic levitation here. These pages include complete design details for several maglev demonstrators which levitate small iron parts. Read all about it and see levitation pictures.

11/28/2009 - Installed 64-bit Windows-7 Professional. I like it. Be sure to check the upgrade grid to see if you need to do a clean install or not. For example, you cannot directly upgrade from any 32-bit Windows to 64-bit Windows-7.

8/2/2009 - Added a page about the Mark 5 control panel construction. It's not complete yet but these photos give you a good idea how it will eventually turn out.

7/29/2009 - Added a page about how the Mark 5 capacitor bank is mounted onto heavy copper bus bars. My "bars" came from old 3/4-inch copper pipe from some ancient antideluvian plumbing project. See how the capacitor bank is mounted to minimize bar length, resistance, inductance and total number of connections.

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