A Magnet Is Born

 

 

Magnets are magical little objects but I had no idea making them was so badass. The messy and dangerous process in this video is fun to watch, and the infectious synth music makes it downright addictive, as does the narrator, who has an appealing accent from somewhere in the UK. He describes the workflow inside the foundry which is basically......scraps of metal are shoved into an electrical induction furnace, which electromagnetically heats and dissolves them into hot lava. Some dude stirs this molten metal stew, then pours the hot molten broth into molds, which then burst into flame! because they contain flammable gases. This is all by design. Workers then send the blazing molds to a couple of other guys who start beating the sh*t out of them with sledgehammers, while getting splashed with sparks and molten metal. But that's only the beginning. Some dude has to rake through all the debris and broken pieces with his hands to find the metal chunks that came out of the molds.  But wait. They still aren't magnetized. The metal next has to be packed into a tube with sand and heated yet again to a zillion degrees in another "electrical furnace", so it can be zapped with an electromagnetic field. But wait, this only orients the magnetic field. The pieces still aren't very magnetic. So they have to be sent over to another station where a guy shoots more than 300 volts through the metal to make it a full-blown, finished magnet. Finally.