Magnets on the work bench

On a sunny day (Wed, 10 Feb 2010 13:49:55 -0700) it happened D Yuniskis wrote in :

My floppies are far away in the attic, next to the CRT monitors... The CRT stuff was why I kept magnets away.

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Glue? LOL

We don't allow magnets in the house (way too much magnetic media!)

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Only works with ferrous screws. Someday you'll find yourself wondering why a particular screw "doesn't stick" (even if only for a moment). Then, you'll find a more universal way to hold screws on your screwdriver! ;-)

ing just jumped to it :-)

When I was a tech in the USAF, they issued beryllium screwdrivers, so that we could work safely around magnetrons and BWOs (backward-wave oscillators). A magnetic screwdriver can be handy sometimes, but it's nice to have the option! :-)

I don't know if it's still possible to buy a nonmagnetic screwdriver, since beryllium has been declared toxic by our lord protectors.[1]

Cheers! Rich [1] For the humour-impaired, this is Sarcasm.

I think the only floppies I now have left are those for the Unisite. I'm more concerned with disks, mag tape, video tape and audio tape (the last two just until I can finish transcribing everything to digital format)

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There are some mechanical devices that can do this. I used to use a magnetic screwdriver until encountering painted/plated nonferrous screws (and wondering why it wouldn't "stick"). The same holds true for nylon, of course. Also, when working in tight quarters in a ferrous box, screws tend to "lean" off the screwdriver towards the wall of the box -- since mounting holes are often close to the edges of a box.

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Since when was 1.2 T 'not very strong'?!

Chris

Am 10.02.2010 21:09, schrieb Jan Panteltje:

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If you work with magnetometers, all this stuff will be a curse. I was wondering, why those fine HMC104Xs kept showing wrong values, even though I had removed all magnetic stuff and put it at least 2m away.

After an hour I found some old Deutschmark coins, NT$ coins and paper-clips in the drawer below the work bench....

Falk

Since these bad boys showed up.

Tim

On a sunny day (Wed, 10 Feb 2010 14:06:37 -0700) it happened D Yuniskis wrote in :

OK, your posting reminded me to keep the magnets aways from my 1TB USB harddisk.... it is full, can you imagine, wiping out 1 Terabyte ... I still have an old VHS in the attic, but everything was copied to CD (DivX) or DVD long ago.

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Yes I had one, a screwdriver with a split point in a hollow tube, but that did not work on those cross-head screws. No idea what happened to it...

Drop of ten second glue, but if you do it too often the screw head gets full and impossible to unlock.

On a sunny day (Wed, 10 Feb 2010 13:01:06 -0800 (PST)) it happened Rich Grise on Google groups wrote in :

I have some plastic trimmers :-)

Yes, noticed.

On a sunny day (Wed, 10 Feb 2010 13:19:55 -0800 (PST)) it happened Chris wrote in :

just jumped to it :-)

Since I can separate thing from it easily. I think you can buy higher Telsa super magnets that come with a warning not to get your fingers in between :-) Wonder if they send them by mail, LOL.

On a sunny day (Wed, 10 Feb 2010 22:34:48 +0100) it happened Falk Willberg wrote in :

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Hey, my workbench has steel drawers :-)

harddisk....

DVD long ago.

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and impossible to unlock.

This stuff works well and doesn't leave any deposits. It's reusable, so a small package will last years:

Nothing compared with magnestars (magnetars)

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Not in the real world of stainless steels being in wide use.

I have put hard drives, VHS tapes, Floppies, and all other manner of magnetic storage medium on my speakers and have never, ever had a problem. I have even taken magnets and tried to erase floppies and hard drives etc, with closely proximal magnets, and have never been able to erase data from them.

I did own a mechanical, magnet only cassette eraser that worked perfectly upon completion of a dual pass thru with the cassette tape.

That little sucker had an array of opposed field magnets setup inside it, and it was just barely a free fit on the cassette form factor.

For the most part though, written data is fairly strongly held on the medium. A nearby field morphs it, but usually only temporarily, and rarely does it flip even one bit.

Modern hard drives with perpendicular recording are even less prone to loss of as written data. Just prior to the era though, the bigger drives of the horizontal head orientation drives were likely more susceptible to a few errant bit flips.

Maybe they should make a high security hard drive with magnets inside it on a lever such that when an emergency data erasure was desired, one would flip the lever over, and the spinning disc would erase within seconds. Then, a reformat might show a forensic examiner no old data to examine. Just putting a bullet through the platters works too.

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Only certain forms of it. Non-metallic, specialized screwdrivers are, of course, still available.

Just like as in RoHS, you should know that certain important parties are exempt.

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Looks pretty boring to me. Maybe about 4 inches. :-)

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get your fingers

It would be cool to package them so that they can be "inspected", but set it up so the inspector gets unavoidably pinched by them. :-)