The mother of all videos!

The quest continued today, despite my back injury to build the front door unlocking mechanism. There were plenty frustrations today! I'm in no way going to throw the towel in on this one. Even if what I come out with costs way more than anybody else's solution, I will perservere.

Today was fraught with difficulty. Yesterday or the day before, I'd reglued the end of my wire to the brass tube. After I'd finished winding the coil, the damn glue failed again! So my nicely wound coil suddenly sprang loose and ended up looking more like a slinky than anything else. Wrapping tape and spraying glue ended up with a loosely wound coil that's definitely not to my liking. I might re-wrap that coil another day.

Next, I connected a pp3 battery clip to the two wires. That was a challenge as the enamel on the wire was extrordinarily thick. Normally it's easy to burn through with a soldering iron. This was most definitey not easy and had to be scraped off.

What I'm trying to do is to rig up a method of lifting the latch that holds the front door closed without going to extremes such as electric garage door openers that require the door to be both opened and closed electrically or other severe methods such as replacing the entire door assemly. This is such a simple thing to do yet is proving to be extraordinarily difficult!
 
The upshot of today's work (which I'll probably have to redo) is that I did manage to make a rare earth permanent magnet move out of my coil. It had little to no actual power behind it which is a major problem. I'm currently running it off 6v. I'll have to try raising the power to 12v but this is not currently looking promising. I have found that I was correct in using a permanent magnet with my coil however. I suspect I might get more luck with more power and possibly extra coil windings.


As you can see - it's not that powerful even though it is spectacular. It looks to have the right amount of throw to open my latch - just not yet enough power.