Fun with Magnets

Back in October of '25, I did a post that I called, A Simple Experiment.  For that experiment, I weighed a string of Buckyball magnets on our digital kitchen scale. My question was, how much would the same magnets weigh if I balanced them vertically on the scale, and put the top of the string into the magnet field of a powerful magnet suspended above them? In other words, how much of the total weight of the string would be supported by the overhead magnet?    

What I found, to my disappointment, was that the kitchen scale was not accurate enough to give me a reading.  I'd need a better scale.  

The other day, I was thinking about the experiment and decided to buy a proper scale. The one I chose was a jeweler's scale, which has a maximum weight limit of 20 grams and measures to thousandths of a gram. 

This post will show you the results of that trial. 

These are the magnets I plan to balance on the jeweler's scale. They are on our kitchen scale in this picture. I wanted the big spherical magnet on top because I like the way it looks, almost hovering in mid air. And because it's heavy. It probably makes up most of the 57 grams. 

This is the arrangement.  You can see a bit of the powerful neodymium (N42) magnet in the decorated box above the balanced string.  The string of magnets is resting on the jeweler's scale. 

Do you want to make a guess on the apparent weight before you go further?

Here is the result.  It reads 4.920 grams.  

I was hoping to see an even lower weight.  

I tried to add one more Buckyball, thereby raising the string and the sphere just a bit closer to the large magnet.  I hoped that this might cause the apparent weight of the string to go down, despite the weight of one additional Buckyball, but this addition brought the large sphere a little too close to the top magnet and it pulled it up and it made contact. It's really touchy.  

So, about 91.3% of the weight of the string of magnets is being supported by the field above it.  

I intend to continue to play with other arrangements of Buckyballs and other magnets. What I'd love to see is how low a weight (by percentage) on the scale I could produce. I'll keep you posted.   -djf