John,

In the sense that most people are familiar with magnets, zinc is not magnetic. But according to the latest studies by scientist everything is magnetic...the magnetic force just has to be strong enough to reaction with such materials we normally say aren't. It is kind of like electricity and insulators. There is no such thing as an insulator, lets just say some materials don't conduct the flow of electricity very well. Now if the electrical current is powerful enough, anything will conduct electricity. Such is, in a generalization, everything is magnetic. I can't remember what university discovered this, I want to say one in Florida. They have a very powerful electromagnet (costs them $180,000 a month to power it) and they picked up a frog with it on I believe the History Channel.

Joe

Betcha it was the iron in his hemoglobin in his blood -- and in his bone marrow, let's not forget that dense frothy solid site where the red blood cells are constructed.

<grin>

Oldfeller

Yeah, every electron responds to magnetic fields. But you still won't pick up a zinc wheelweight with a magnet. Even a superconducting one.

John,

They may be able to hover it, who knows, I doubt they tried it. Sure would be fun to play with don't you think?

Joe

Definitely it would be a great toy!

John...did you ever pick up a CZ52 pistol?

Joe

Yep. Passed it along to my son.

Nice shooter. Impractical to handload for. Can't find the brass. Bitch to reassemble after cleaning.

John,

Midway has Starline brass on sale for $15.99. I had no trouble at all getting brass. I found it easy to load cast for, but I bit loud. I bet you're talking about getting the barrel out of the slide, then back in. If you make a punch to fit that hole in in the breech block for disassembly it's quite alot easier, if you don't, like you mentioned it's a bear.

I have some milsurp rifles I may be selling, pm and and I'll tell you what they are.

Joe

I don't mean trouble buying brass. Finding it after shooting is the problem. It goes to the moon!

The problem with reassembly is getting the barrel to go through the bushing at the front with the spring under compression. Only ways I've found to do it are to insert a rod in the muzzle through the bushing and have a partner lift up on it while pushing the barrel into place, or do the same and push the rod down against a table or some such to take the place of the partner. In any case, it's a bitch!

Check out how these guys use powerful magnets to shrink quarters down to dime size...

http://205.243.100.155/frames/shrinker.html

I levitated a cat once, and I didn't have a superconducting magnet either. N. S. Sherlock