Today I was researching the effects of magnets on silver. Fortunately I have some strong 2 Tesla neodymium magnets to experiment with. And was I ever pleased with my findings. Holding these strong magnets up to a 10 ounce or 1kg bar you feel an odd "slow motion" braking effect as you move the magnet across or hover it over the surface. It's a strange sensation. Not attractive at all but rather a feeling of stiriring a thick treacle. My magnet attracts cupronickel very strongly so 50c pieces stick to it firmly. I tried the effect on a 50c silver coin and lo and behold the effect is present on it as well. Once you are familiar with the feeling its undoubtable. An excellent test of silver imo.
I cant test it on gold except for a few small coins and dont really get the feeling to any great degree. I'm going to take the magnets with me next time I visit my bigger gold and will report back on how bars of gold react. I also have some big copper and tungsten samples that I'll try this on later tonight. Was pressed for time earlier.
Very interestin' stuff here.Appears to be a fairly low cost way of testing silver. How would one go about getting one's mitts on these magnets?
Magnets? Always gave thought to this idea. Why not have all cars, trucks, buses, etc fitted with the same + or - magnets? Will they never crash together?
Eddy currents are different to regular atttraction you would get by doping with ferrite. However, afaik the same effect occurs for copper, so this cannot be used to identify fakes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddy_currents http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddy_current_brake Check out this video on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-M8qp2_KSQ&feature=youtube_gdata_player
I had noticed the same effect too. A good source of these magnets are disused hard drives. There's always one, generally two in each.
