Village Games' Blog

Recently one of our regulars (Mike Z.) hit upon an awesome idea for making flight stands (i.e. for aircraft, spaceships, etc.). He married up high-powered rare earth magnets with brass tubes and steel ball bearings to create a universal joint mount that allows movement in almost any direction.  As you can see from the pictures, it is pure genius.

The mountings are very easy to make, and because of the ball bearing/magnet attachment, the flight stands are interchangeable to a degree – each model gets its own ball bearing assembly which can be placed on any of the magnetic stands. The other thing that is pretty amazing is, due to the incredible strength of the magnets, these bases can be used for almost any scale.

The only ‘glitch’ he has encountered so far is that for larger/heavier models there is a point of rotation where the weight of the model and gravity will conspire to rotate the model downward against the user’s wishes. Given that the ball bearings are essentially frictionless, there really isn’t much to stop this movement. Mike is experimenting with coating the top of the magnet with a thin layer of a rubbery substance (e.g. acrylic caulk, etc.) to see if that can provide a bit of resistance without disrupting the magnetic pull. Maybe with enough public pressure, we can get Mike to do a pretty write-up of how to make these for the Downloads section of the webpage - let him know if you are interested in the Forums section!

Now, having seen the light, I have placed an order for a bunch of the tubular magnets and ball bearings myself to start re-mounting all of my flying models in this fashion.

Well, until next time…

Here is to hoping your rudder is true!

Dan