I have a 13 pound solid iron(?) "C" magnet that used to be a precision industrial magnet used in chemical research. One leg is weaker than the other which is probably why it was discarded. I was told the max field strength for this kind of magnet was about 11,000 Gauss. When it was discarded I measured the strength as 6,500 Gauss. That was 40 years ago. I'm sure it's less than half what it could be and I'd like to make it stronger. I was thinking of using a car battery to run a few hundred amps through a coil a few times to strengthen each leg of this magnet. I'm looking for some guidance to be on the safe side. Not to mention I'm concerned about the flyback effect when I open the circuit. Normally a diode can shunt the reverse current but I don't have any 500 amp diodes, so how would I prevent the reverse current from un-doing what the forward current did? I'm sure I'd be overlooking something if I tried to do this without asking for some advice. I don't know how to determine the field strength I'd need to generate with the coil I made. The magnet appears to be solid iron but appearances can be deceiving. I haven't got any means of measuring field strength directly. The way I do it now is to measure the time it takes for a strip of metal to drop between the poles, while being slowed by eddy currents, Lenz's Law. It's just a relative comparison. Even so, I don't know if it is even possible to calculate the field strength needed to give the results I see. Anybody have any ideas?
Thanks.
Thanks.