I'm trying to salvage electromagnets from electrical components. What electrical components will have powerful electromagnets inside them? (I can buy them but they seem to be expensive and i want cheap ones )
cheers,
Pracas
a long time ago... lots of things did... nowadays there are fewer and fewer options. For example: Reel to reel tape recorders were loaded with them. You can find 110V units in things like Dish washers and clothes washers.
Can you get old Pinball Machines cheap (obviously one for parts not one that works)?
Solenoids and relays come to mind, although they're not "optimized" to be electromagnets, so whether they're suitable will depend on what you had in mind doing with them. They might also require significant dis-assembly.
A typical brushless fan might yield as many as four reasonably powerful electromagnets, although of somewhat odd shape, and probably not too easy to cut apart...
You can consider winding your own; a simple coil winding jig is not that hard to improvise...
I found two electromagnets in an HP Laserjet III printer. I think the Laserjet II will be the same. They're quite squat coils with a moving armature on one end (which can be removed). They're on the brown PCB in the lower right-hand corner of this photo: Parts from HP LaserJet IIID laser printer | Huge haul of par… | Flickr
Since I also had the duplexer on that printer (it had been damaged by water and couldn't be fixed), there were also a number of solenoids in that part of the mechanism. Maybe photocopiers would be another place to look? The more complex the paper-handling mechanism, the better, it seems!
Thats a lot of useful things for a project inside a printer