Homemade Magnetic Levitating Bed

Reddit user with the nickname ‘mememetatata’ built this awesome levitating bed using plywood and hockey puck sized rare earth magnets. With $1,000, he built this floating bed that can comfortably sleep one person upto 250 pounds due to the fact that two people would make the rig collapse.

Building the frame of the levitating part of the bed. Fits a twin sized mattress. It's 74 inches long and 38 inches wide.


Another angle


Put in the slats that will keep the magnets in place


Put the magnets in and closed it up


Highly technical drawing of one of the corners of the main thing


Making the frame of the lower platform. It is 8 feet long and 7 feet wide


Another angle


Due to bad packaging in the magnet shipment, two of the magnets got stuck together. This is incredibly bad news because there are several hundred pounds of force holding these together now. After a lot of raging and angrily emailing the company that I got the magnets from, I realized that a rubber glove I was handling the magnets with was stuck between them. It provided a gap of around 2mm. I used scissors to pry this open and stick successively larger things inside.


Got a pen in (I taped around the pen so that the splinters wouldn't get everywhere if the pen shattered, which it did ;D)


Three pens and a spacer


Two spacers and a pen


I was worried that the pens would fall out and I would lose all of my prying progress, or that all of my spacing would fall out and they would be entirely stuck together with no gap, in which case they would be entirely and impossibly stuck together (many hundreds of pounds of force holding them together, these are solid neodymium rare earth magnets the size of hockey pucks). I used screws, which since they are magnetic, stood no chance of falling out! They also worked pretty well to prop them apart.


Two spacers


I stomped on the spacers to jam them and a pen in. I then replaced the pen with a third spacer and got them unstuck!


Slight damage. Essentially only aesthetic. Tests I did confirmed that the magnets were for all intents and purposes entirely functional.


Finishing up the base.


Put it all together. Steel cable tethers the top bed to the bottom base. Had to do some math to determine how long the cable needed with how high I calculated that the bed would float. I got this stabilization system (and most of the idea of the bed!) from this bed which is a much larger scale, much more expensive version http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=hgI5jSC3NwY#t=94s


View underneath the platform


The steel cable goes into the platform where it is attached and screwed in.


Complete bed! Although I haven't yet put on the trim and nice looking parts, or put on a clear coat of paint to make it shinier/cleaner looking.