Dinky Motor
Ever wonder what’s inside an electric motor or how it works? Dinky Motor is a DIY Electric Motor suitable for students or just for fun.
Make your own electric motor from a kit using instructions. A great experience for future engineers, makers, artists and philosophers alike! Discover Electro-Magnetism, magnets, motors and other miracles of our amazing universe!
Dinky Motor kits were designed in Ottawa and are made here too. Free delivery in Ottawa area up until the upcoming MakerFaire (this weekend)!
The project started in summer 2013. Here are some of the behind-the-scene reports for the Dinky Motor project. It has evolved very quickly to be easy to make requiring no soldering and little or no glue (any glue suitable for wood is optional).
Here is a short video on how to assemble an electric motor with a few tips on debugging at the end.
I used 3 – AA batteries and the motor ran perfect right from the start. Having built a couple of other motor kits those motors took much more effort to get the motor running. The big advantage with the Dinky motor was that the pieces fit together so perfect and everything is so accurate which is important with electric motors.
Thanks Bill! Glad you enjoyed it and it worked so well!
Do you have to use jumpers or could you just touch the wires to either end of the battery?
Any wire should work. It’s rather awkward to hold wires onto a battery so some tape can help. Electrical tape is great since it’s a bit stretchy. You can put some batteries in series. Don’t forget you have to push the motor…
Technically touching wires to the battery is fine. But tape will make it better. I find around 6V is good. I’ve run them on one batter at 1.5V but that’s after tuning it at 6V. That’s 4 batteries in series. I guess 3 is enough too…
If you send me an email, I’ll send you out something.