Schani's SuperMag Page

Introduction to SuperMag

SuperMag is a magnetic construction kit, similar to GeoMag. The building blocks are metallic spheres and magnetic bars, which come in two lengths:

Illustration of bar lengths

As illustrated, the ratio between a short and a long bar (measured from the centers of the spheres attached to them) is 1 to the square root of 2, which means, among other things, that you can build a right triangle with one long bar, two short bars, and three spheres. This is the main difference between GeoMag and SuperMag. The former only has only one length of bars, so right triangles cannot be built.

On this page you'll find lots of examples of SuperMag constructions and guides and instructions on how to build your own. Most of the topics discussed here are equally well applicable to GeoMag. If you have comments, corrections, criticism, or anything else to discuss with me, feel free to mail me.

Polyhedra

Polyhedra are (three dimensional) solids composed out of polygons. There's an infinite number of them and most of them cannot be built with SuperMag, but then again, most of them are unintersting and ugly. Fortunately, it turns out that a lot of interesting ones can be built and in this section you'll find an assortment of the ones I have constructed. If you want to build polyhedra yourself, be sure to check out my tips on building stable regular polygons.

Platonic Solids

Platonic solids are convex polyhedra with equivalent faces, which are regular polygons. There are only five of them, and they are all fairly easy to build.

Archimedean Solids

Archimedean solids are convex polyhedra composed out of (nonintersecting) regular polygons with each vertex having the same configuration of polygons of more than one type. There are 13 of them, ranging from simple to complex, and I've built them all.

Johnson Solids

Johnson solids are convex polyhedra composed out of regular polygons of equal edge lengths (with the exception of Platonic Solids, Archimedean Solids and prims and anti-prims). All in all there are 92 of them of which I have built a few.

Other Polyhedra

This is an assortment of various other polyhedra I've built.

Juggling Polyhedra

Juggling is, without a question, one of the most enjoyable things you can do, at least if you're a juggler. Most jugglers like experimenting with new props, so why not try out juggling polyhedra built out of SuperMags?

Other Constructs

A Column of Spheres

A Tall Tower Before and After Its Collapse

A Spiral Tower

A Large Crane

Two Very Similar Caskets

An Icosahedron Extension Thingy

HowTos

Handling Magnetism

Here I discuss how to use and abuse the magnetism in SuperMag constructions. The two main topics of this little piece are how to arrange bars for maximum stability and how to build stronger magnets, and what you can use them for.

Building Regular Polygons for Polyhedra

Polygons with more than three edges are not suitable for building polyhedra if they are not sufficiently stabilized. In this HowTo I'll discuss how to build stable polygons with up to 10 edges, sufficient to build all Archimedean solids.

Scaling Polyhedra

The standard way to build a polyhedron is to use either a short or a long bar as an edge. Here I describe a few ways to make edges longer, either by using more than one bar in a string - directly connected or separated via spheres - or by using even bigger structures as edges.

Links

Plastwood are the creators of SuperMag. Unfortunately, there is not much useful information on their site concerning SuperMag constructions.

Peter Jepsen's Flickr page

Rodrigo Veas's Flickr page


Schani's Homepage