Saturday, July 11, 2020

Maggin'

I have been playing with cartridges lately and one of the central points to any cartridge is the magnet.  I built this charging coil to re-magnetize the alnico magnet in a denon 103.



For s sense of scale here it is in relation to a charge coil for the magnet in a Sequerra ribbon.



This is a piece of more contemporary audio history.  JC built the charger for Dick Sequerra to charge the magnets for his ribbon drivers.


 The charger uses an ignitron (yes I insist on mercury even in my cartridges) to dump up to 14,000µf @ 600V into the charge coil.






While running it through its paces I was able to reverse the field in a N52 Neo magnet and in my attempt to see if I was reaching maximum charge this happened when I set the voltage to 400V and got a larger "POP" then expected.



The coil was 10 turns of #16 wire encased in JB weld.  The wire broke into several parts and the JB weld was nowhere to be found.   I have always heard stories how they would often vaporize the charge coil in big magnets.... never thought I would experience it first hand.




4 comments:

  1. You need a webcam running while you work so you can capture this sort of thing... Crazy man.... Crazy...

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  2. i magnitized ferrite for dick's ribbon speakers with a charger much like the one you show.... is it the same one? it was exciting and catastophic. always fun to vaporize #10 gauge solid copper. yes, you CAN feel the emp in your arms when you trip the ignitron.

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