Electromagnetic Boots For All Your Upside Down Needs!

magnet boots

X-Men: Days of Future Past is making its way to theaters around the world, and [Mr. Furze] has released his second X-Men related hack — Magneto Boots.

In case you missed it, [Colin Furze] has made three projects to celebrate geekdom and a mastery of fabrication for all the comic book fans out there. He started with the fully functional pneumatic Wolverine Claws, and now he’s tackling Magneto’s powers. The third project isn’t out quite yet, but we can’t wait to see the final installment!

Now the problem with Magneto is his powers are a wee bit too… magical? Without special effects, you can’t really replicate his mutant abilities (please prove us wrong if you can!), so [Colin] decided to do the next best thing. Magnetize himself — well, his shoes.

Not wanting to spend too much money on this project, he needed electromagnets — but where do you get cheap electromagnets? The answer? Microwave ovens. By salvaging the transformers out of microwave ovens, you can easily cut them in half, remove the secondary coils, and bam, you’ve got a bunch of giant electromagnets.

Some steel plates later, a bit of TIG welding, and he put together a pair of strap-on electro-magnetic boots. Each electromagnet is capable of lifting over 80kg off of a 12V car battery — conveniently more than enough to support [Colin’s] weight. His next challenge was learning how to walk upside down.

And of course, the final product.

43 thoughts on “Electromagnetic Boots For All Your Upside Down Needs!

    1. No, I think that they are great.

      In what way do you find them obnoxious?

      Troll? If so, I guess I got sucked in…
      I just watched all three of the above videos, and still can’t see it.
      He makes one reference to “our American friends”, but not in a nasty/derogatory way, so I don’t see how anyone could find that offensive.
      He swears a couple of times, but I didn’t find that to be excessive…

      His laughing is somewhat maniacal at times, but that isn’t obnoxious, just a bit quirky.
      To be honest, his workshop looks great, so I would be in my element playing in there too.

      Safety-wise, some people would moan, but he seems pretty competent, so I don’t have a problem with how he does things.

      All joking aside, what do you find offensive?

      1. OK… I just saw the gas bottle burns video (mentioned by @HV later on in these comments)… time to retract my comments about his safety :)

        I am still jealous of his workshop though, and enjoy watching his videos.

        1. You should watch his pulse-jet-in-a-van video. They fire it up, and then, while firing, it falls down ’cause it melted the nylon straps holding it up.

          He’s terribly unsafe, but appears to only be so with himself and his friends, not so much with anyone else, so good on them. Risking life and limb while having a blast!

  1. Personally, I love his videos and enthusiasm, but I can see how it could turn others off. That said, these are fairly sweet, minus the fact that they’re tethered to two giant car batteries. Reminds me of the Gravity Boots from Star Trek more than X-Men. Can’t wait for power storage technology to get dense enough to have something like this in an actual shoe form factor!

  2. all ironman and other exoskeleton projects should incorporate this, even if only for a short time… if you could get some really strong electropermanent magnets, attach them to a tether with a power line to turn it on and off, that’d be one badass, hookless, “grappling hook”.

      1. The nice thing about the Radus Boots was that they used magnetic redirection, the electropermanent magnet reference barry99705 gave above, so the coils need to be energized only to stick the foot to the ceiling and to remove the foot from the ceiling but not while the foot was attached.
        But heck, it’s fun either way!

  3. I wonder why he made the switch cables so short. Or, could the switches be incorporated into the shoes somehow?

    Anyhow, I enjoy watching his videos. I don’t think he’s as cavalier as he looks; I think that’s just part of his public persona. From watching how he fabricates stuff, to me, he seems to be quite thoughtful and deliberate.

    1. I think he’s more cavalier than you think. Did you see the video where he was building a turbo-turbine out of a toilet paper roll holder and set his arm on fire, resulting in 3rd degree burns (and had some of his hospital visits in the video as well)? I still enjoy his videos though :D

  4. The problem with simple magnetic boots using such strong magnets is that, once the foot is planted, unless he is King Kong himself, the astronaut cannot pick up the foot again.

    However, the Radus boots completely solved that problem. If the permanent magnet fields are switched off for that foot that the astronaut wishes to lift, he can lift it easily and take another step. Then if the fields are switched on again as he places his foot down, this switching of the fields allows him to walk in a manner resembling normal walking, though a little slower.

    To do that switching by normal “battery and coils” would be prohibitively bulky and heavy.

    With the Radus boots, the astronaut could pick up his foot by simply switching off the permanent magnetic fields easily. They switched on again when he placed the foot down. And he did not have to carry a huge battery around with him, to furnish enormous current to do that.

    Well, it doesn’t take a genius to see that, when you can switch a permanent magnet’s fields easily, and the magnet also has a built-in memory as did the Radus magnets, then with a little ingenuity in switching one could use such switchable magnets to produce a self-switching, self-powered permanent magnet motor. The magnet, being a permanent dipole, is already a particular kind of “free energy generator”, since it continuously gates magnetic energy directly from the vacuum due to its asymmetry in the energetic vacuum flux.

    http://www.cheniere.org/misc/astroboots.htm

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