Building an Electric Motor

On Thursday, the whole Physics class got to partner up and built a motor. Even though my fingers were sore afterwards, it was still a great experience. The materials we used to build this motor were a piece of wood, nails, a cork, a pop can, a kabob stick and a long piece of wire. First we had to hammer the nails into the wood. It was particularly hard since the nails kept on becoming loose and end up falling out even though we got no idea why. So we had to put a lot of elbow grease into it. J Next, my partner, Florina, cuts the pop can into two rectangular pieces and we rubbed it with sandpaper. Another challenge was when we had to twist the kabob stick into the cork, but after A LOT of twisting and turning, we managed to get it through. Coiling the wire onto the cork was confusing since the wire should be coiled perpendicular to the nails, but we got it right the first time, so we did not have to redo it again. When everything was in its places, we realized how fragile it was. Every now and then, something falls out and the strips from the can were not touching the nails. Florina and I sort of panicked when the class was over but luckily, we got another 15 minutes today to fix things up a bit and test it out. Unfortunately, our first test did not go so well, and the second test did not go so well too. Even though we did not see our motor actually spinning, we did see some sparks flying, which was pretty cool, I guess.