If you are interested in alternative energy it’s very important for you to understand electric motors. A great way to start learning about electric motors is to build one yourself.

We put together a kit for what is probably the world’s simplest electric motor, it’s called a homopolar motor. The motors are easy to build but hard to understand. First, there is no obvious reason why they rotate at all! Humm…

Our kit includes enough materials to build two homopolar motors.

You May Not Need Our Kit

If you already have some powerful magnets of the right size and shape, some stiff copper wire and some double AA batteries in your junk box, you can get started right away. However, the magnets and copper wire are hard to find in some areas

Even if you are using part that you found locally, feel free to download our homopolar motor kit instructions in .pdf format for free. (size 5 Mb)

How to Find the Parts Locally

I did a video to make it easier for you to find the parts locally. But with the price of gas and the value of your time, I think our kit is still a good deal, especially because you can build two motors from it.

Our Kit Makes it Easy

We put all the hard to find items (and some batteries to make it even easier) in a box along with a great set of instructions. This kit includes two neodymium magnets, two AA batteries, and 4 ft (1.2 m) of the right size copper wire.

Your Can Build Two Motors From Our Kit

This is enough material to build at least two motors and have some extra copper wire for experimenting with new designs.

Keep the magnets far away from your iphone, your laptop, or any hard drive. They are very powerful and will quickly damage any kind of magnetic hard drive if they get too close.

Battery Tips

After you have used the batteries in a homopolar motor you probably shouldn’t put them into any electronic equipment, because the batteries are more likely to leak after being used in a homopolar motor.

Oh, and don’t use the new lithium AA batteries that are available in some areas. They are too powerful to safely build this kind of motor.

Watch Our How to Build a Homopolar Motor Video

This video has had over 45,000 views on YouTube, so a lot of people think it’s a good video.

Note that the current version of this kit contains two magnets, two batteries, and four feet of copper wire. That’s slightly different than described in the video below but still enough to have lots of fun with.