The Silver Bear Cafe

An inventor from Chicago who goes by the pseudonym, "Mylow", appears to have a knack for getting all-magnet motor designs to work that are based on the efforts of the late Howard Johnson. And he is intent on giving his design away to the planet in an open source manner. On March 17, 2009, he posted his first video showing full rotation of the "Stonehenge model", that Johnson worked on in the early 1980s to demonstrate to the U.S. Patent Office. Mylow purposely kept his replication as close as possible to Johnson's design -- per the photos, not the patent. He has also appears to have replicated the linear track design into a rotary design, using bar magnets around the perimeter of the rotor disc. In all, he appears to have come up with 6 different variations of magnets that have worked. The effect seams to be a function of the relationship between the stator and rotor magnets, and the spacing between the rotor magnets and magnet sets. His replicas begin to turn once the stator horseshoe (U-shaped) magnet(s) come near the rotor magnets on the perimeter of the rotor. The spacing there may be a way to govern the speed of rotation. The rotor spins up to an equilibrium speed. The eddy currents generated in the aluminum components may be part of how the effect works. / Mylow's motor is based off of Howard R. Johnson's permanent magnetic motor (patent No. 4151431).