Magnetic Tailors

How a small shop in northern Alabama has reimagined how to use magnets

- Chris Nelson

A simple working knowledge of magnets has long been satisfactory to appreciate their interactions. Magnets are made of metal or an alloy that has somehow been magnetized, and they have one north pole and one south pole, connected by invisible magnetic fields that blossom outward, attracting opposite poles and repelling like poles. This for years has done right by us.

Then we stumbled upon Polymagnets, “smart” magnets created by Huntsville, Alabama based company Correlated Magnetics Research. While the magnets’ basic construction is unaltered, CMR uses its patented, in-house developed Mag Printer machine—a 3-D printer fitted with a small coil that “dots” a magnet’s face with an intense, precise magnetic field, sort of like a magnetic LaserJet—to alter magnetic fields and change their function. There are a series of Polymagnets, all designed to do different things. For example, one pair of Polymagnets functions as a spring, attracting from a distance but repelling when they draw closer. Another set functions as a latch, repelling from a distance but spinning and latching when forced together, and more specialized sets blend both springing and latching.