Custom Magnets

Custom Magnets Here's another fun fact about custom magnets which are more commonly known as kitchen magnets. You may wonder why custom magnets and kitchen magnets don't react the same as the bar magnets that you may have used for experiments in you grade school science class. This is an interesting question, because if you put one custom magnet next to another, they don't repel or attract each other. The bar magnets you played with in school (and which get discussed in most textbooks) are a single piece of iron which have been given a preferred north and south pole. This is why they repel or attract each other. But kitchen magnets are mainly composed of molded rubber with many small pieces of magnetized iron suspended inside. You can think of each of these small pieces of iron as a little bar magnet, each one having a different polarity. Now, if you wanted to, it would be possible to orient the poles of all of these small magnetic pieces in the same direction during manufacturing. Then you would have very powerful refrigerator magnets which would attract or repel each other depending on their orientation, just like polarized bar magnets. But in the real world, this is not actually what the customer or the manufacturer wants. Powerful polarized custom magnets like this would be hard to pack together for shipping, and would stick too strongly to your refrigerator. This is why custom magnets are widely used for refrigerator advertising. Custom magnets are strong enough to hold papers, but are really made to be flexible for the consumer, and become a long lasting collectible refrigerator magnet for the company who distributes them. The manufacturers of refrigerator magnets make sure that the orientations of the different iron pieces located in the custom magnets are pointed in different directions, so the back surface of your magnet contains a mixture of north and south poles. When the magnet is very close to your refrigerator, it behaves like a whole bunch of small magnets which individually stick to the surface of the door. But when you take it even a small distance away from the refrigerator, the average field coming from the magnet becomes close to zero, making it easy to remove. This is the reason why kitchen magnets have very little effect on each other. If you bring two of them together, they will orient themselves so that there will be a slightly larger number of opposite poles touching each other than the like poles, but since this is the lowest energy condition possible, two refrigerator magnets repelling one another would be very unlikely. Because of their staying power, custom magnets have become collectible refrigerator magnets. Not only are they fun, but because of the materials, construction and functionality, custom magnets can last someone a lifetime. Learn More: www.paylessmagnets.com