Does this look intense?

Measure twice, cut it once.

Name the Parts?

This picture will only mean something to those who know the parts of a DC motor. Next week we will finish the motors and do experiments with them.

That armature shaft is a quarter inch in diameter, with four cold rolled steel laminations 2.62" in diameter, epoxied together. The three coils are two hundred turns each of 24 gauge magnet wire, and taped after they are wound.

The commutator segments are copper with the magnet wires soldered to them. The insulator material is heat shrink tubing.

Future Electrical Engineers!?

The boys are holding up the "guts" to their motors, called the rotor or armature. They cut their own steel shafts, stacked and epoxy'ed the armature laminations and made the commutators out of copper. By the end of this third club meeting, they had wound 400 turns out of the 600 turns each of them will wind on the motors' armatures. That's a lot of counting!

Next week the motors should be spinning away at eye blirring speeds!

Good job guys!

We made them ourselves!

Each club member is holding his own project board that he made using lots of different tools. They are standing in front of the CNC milling machine that they watched cut out one of the laminations that will be used in their real motor project that will start at the next club meeting.

Learning and building is fun

The guys converted their Telegraph sender into a buzzer, then improved the buzzer by changing the type of metal used for the buzzer contacts.

Finally, they made their own "half motor" on their project board.

Next club meeting we will begin to make a real motor. It will take some patience and careful handwork. We will see how far we can get in three hours.

Creating a half motor

The Creator Club

First Semester, Second Session

Title: Electric Motors and how they work

Exodus 31:3 “And I have filled him with the spirit of God, in wisdom, and in understanding and in knowledge, and in all manner of workmanship, to devise cunning works…”

Prayer, asking for the spirit of God in wisdom, understanding, knowledge, workmanship, and safety.

Review:

Review Cells, and Batteries, including Series connections and Parallel connections and the telegraph (how it worked with only one wire. Mention Samuel Morse again…artist and inventor. Show morse code, and Ascii chart, showing that modern computers still send codes as off and on signals.

Imagine hooking up a pencil to the sender, and a moving paper...how this could be used to decode the messages.

Compare the two cell battery to the 8 cell batteries on the work benches.

Draw on paper a circuit of the telegraph sender.

Talk about how magnets are “motors” and “generators” in preparation for this lesson.

Begin to make a buzzer:

Turn out the lights and look at the sparks that show up after the clapper is disconnected. Ask why? (The electromagnet is generating electricity as the magnetic field collapses.

Modify the drawing to make the telegraph sender into a buzzer. Ask the boys what would happen if we wired it like the circuit drawing shows.

Modify the sender using a paper clip and discuss the engineering problem that results.

Alter the design using brass contacts. Show how to form the brass contacts with a chisel. Puncture a hole in the brass contact.

Alter the design using a diode. Explain a little of how a diode works and how it solves the problem of burned contacts. Discuss contacts…silver.

Make half-motor:

Introduce soldering, and coach the boys in soldering paper clips to brass strips.

Wind coil around CPVC fittings, clean enamel off the ends of the wire.

Scrape the enamel off the ends of the wire to commutate the electric current.

Parts of a motor: armature, commutator, magnets.

Show magnetic fields of magnets using Iron filings and magnetite from the old Iron mine on our land.

Show the effects of a magnet on our video monitor screen.

Show the boys the progress on the “real” motor that we hope to build or start building next week.

Show them various types of electric motors: Battery drill motors, DC toy motors, Stepper motors, Servo motors, Vacuum Cleaner motors, record player motors, and others.

History:

The first electric motors

The first commutator-type direct current electric motor capable of turning machinery was invented by the British scientist William Sturgeon in 1832.

Sturgeon was born in Whittington, Lancashire and apprenticed to a shoemaker. He joined the army in 1802 and taught himself mathematics and physics. In 1824 he became lecturer in science at the East India Company College at Addiscombe, Surrey and in the following year he exhibited his first electromagnet.^[2] He displayed its power by lifting nine pounds with a seven-ounce piece of iron wrapped with wire through which a current from a single battery was sent. In 1828 he put into practice Ampere's idea of a solenoid.

Application:

We have all of these tools, wires, nails, boards, and brass shim-stock. They are things that have already been made for us by intelligent and skilled people. How long would it take for something as simple as the telegraph sender or buzzer, or motor to ever come into existence without intelligent creative people putting it all together? Think about it. Do not ever let anyone try to sell you on the idea that complex things can exist without an intelligent creator. Those that believe such things can happen are fools according to the God of the Bible. “The fool hath said in his heart there is no God.” Psalm 14:1

First Club Session Highlights

Parents may want to review some of the things we are learning. You might learn some things too! It would be great if you asked the boys some questions about the material we covered below.

We began the session remembering The Creator:

Genesis 1:1 “In the Beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.”

Exodus 31:3 “And I have filled him with the spirit of God, in wisdom, and in understanding and in knowledge, and in all manner of workmanship, to devise cunning works…”

Let us remember to pray for wisdom.

Electricity: The movement of electrons or electrical charges through conductors.

We measure electricity in voltage and current. To understand these two measurements, compare a swimming pool 3 ft. high to a piece of garden hose 3 ft high, full of water and both of them having a valve and a water wheel at the bottom. If you measured the pressure in at the valve at the bottom of the pool with the pressure at the bottom of the hose, they would be the same. That is like the voltage. Think of volts like you think of water pressure. The higher the water in the pool, the higher the water pressure. The higher the voltage, the higher the electrical pressure. The bigger around the pool is, the longer it could power the water wheel.

What I have made here is battery towers for you to use for our projects. Each battery is made up of cells. We call them D cells, and dry cells, because they do not have liquid in them. There are eight cells in each battery. The chemicals in each cell make about 1 and a half volts of electrical pressure. So, eight cells makes 12 volts. The car battery also has eight cells, but they are filled with acid. This nine volt battery that I have broken apart has how many cells in it? Count them: (6).

A little AA dry cell battery also makes 1.5 volts, but the car battery is much bigger around, like a swimming pool, so it can make 1.5 volts of pressure a lot longer than the AA cell, and the D cell will last a lot longer than a AA dry cell.

Electrical current is a measurement of how many electrons can pass through a (conductor) wire in a second. We measure current in amps. One amp is a lot of electrons flowing each second. The number of electrons that pass through a wire having one amp is: 6241 000 000 000 000 000. That is a number about 6 plus 18 zeros!

Magnets:

Magnets are pieces of steel, or mixtures of stuff that have iron or other magnetic materials in them. Steel has iron in it, like the earth.

Magnets can be permanent magnets (like the earth) or temporary magnets, called electromagnets.

In magnets, the electrons inside the atoms are all lined up and this makes a force that we can detect and use. In permanent magnets the electrons are stuck in that position. In electro-magnets, the electrons line up with one another while an electric current is passing through a wire wrapped around the magnetic material, but when the electrical current stops, the electrons spring back to their original position. When they spring back to their original position, they generate an electrical current in the wire!

So, when we push electrons through a wire wrapped around a steel nail, for example, it makes the nail an electromagnet, and this electromagnet pulls on other steel or magnetic material. This is how motors and other stuff works.

But, when we remove electric current from the wire, the electrons in the magnetic material go back to their original position, and we use this fact to make electric generators!

Today, we will learn how some of these things can be illustrated in the projects we build.

Build telegraph sender (transmitter).

How long would it have taken this stuff to build itself into a telegraph sender? Did it take intelligence to make it happen or did it all happen by chance?

Samuel Morse:

Samuel Morse was a man who was born shortly after the USA ratified the US Constitution, born in 1792 and died shortly after the Civil War, in 1872 who loved art. He struggled to make a living at being an artist. He was a good artist, but artists always seem to have trouble making money. When he learned from a friend about electromagnetism, he could not get it out of his mind. I guess you could say he was an inventor. That’s often the way inventors live. Ideas keep them awake at night. He made many drawings or sketches of circuits that illustrated his ideas.

In 1837, Morse formed a partnership with Alfred Vail, who gave him money and helped him build a real telegraph sender. They got it patented, and in the Spring of 1844 they put up poles and strung a long steel wire between Washington, DC and Baltimore MD, and sent a message using Morse Code, that said, “What hath God wrought?” taking a verse from the Bible (Numbers 23:23), and giving the Creator the credit for what he had made. The rest of his life, Morse lived off money made by his invention.

Others had also made similar machines even before Morse, as you can learn by doing some research on the subject, but he is given credit for doing the most to make the telegraph a reality.

Let us always remember to give honor and credit to the Creator who made all these things and made it possible for us to use the things He made! He made the wood, the copper, the iron, the chemicals the batteries are made of, and the electrons, and current.

The Telegraph

The first club meeting went on "overtime" for the patiently waiting moms. In this picture we are hastily hooking up one of the boy's sender to the telegraph wire and ground. We sent the electric current through the telegraph wire and the earth to a distant pole where it energized a buzzer whenever the key on the sender "button" was pressed.

Next week we will re-visit the experience and talk about it some more.

Some of the things I had hoped to help the boys will be moved to next week, which will work out perfectly.

The Telegraph Sender

This is the boys' first project. Each boy cut his own boards using a jig saw and a scroll saw. They drilled the holes for the screws, wound their own coils to make their own electromagnets, and began to learn the meaning of the terms volts and current. We talked about electrons and electron flow through conductors and began to learn about electromagnetism and how it can be used. Next week we will make a very simple motor!

Working Together

We have NO competition in The Creator Club. We all work together to build and to learn. Here, Caleb and Luke are working together to drill a hole to mount the electromagnet they made.

What is a Battery? Volt? Amp?

Instruction first, then hands on construction.