Making an electric motor from scrap and reclaimed materials

Here's how to make a simple electric motor - the copper wire is reclaimed from an inductor component pulled from the PSU of a dead inkjet printer, the magnets are taken from a broken computer hard drive, the rest is just bits and pieces of timber and odd nails and screws.

The captions describing construction have deliberately been kept in quick-fire form, to keep the video short - further details on making a motor like this one may be found on the website.

A simple motor like this one could be used as part of a school science project - as the principles employed here are the basis for most of the small electric motors found in so many commonplace objects today. The simplicity of design of a single-coil motor such as this makes it an ideal springboard for exploration and discussion of fields, forces and the physical laws.