How should Ben continue building his automatic can crusher? Post your idea + you might get a free Ben Heck t-shirt!

electromagnet on the bottom, neodynum magnet on the top, same field at rest, electro magnet reverses to crush can

Build a system that uses a weight dropped from a height suitable for crushing a can.  Have a geared motor lift the weight, then release it in free fall to crush the can.  Find a nice sweet spot between weight mass and height needed to get enough force.

Ben should make a high voltage can crusher with huge capacitors, and a large amount of voltage

Ben needs to get serious about this can crusher.  If there's not a big enough commercial solenoid out there ( 150lb with 6" stroke would do it) then there are plenty of other ways to crush the can electronically.  How about a 2 hp pump motor instead of a wimpy little stepper and timing belt.  Further, there are already plenty of can crushers that require you to walk over and place the can in the crusher.  How about a box that sits on top of a garbage can that you just pitch the can into from across the room.  The box senses the can via light/PIR/magnetic field/electric field/sonar/whatever.  Pitch the can in and pow it's smashed flat by a moveable side of the box, then it drops into the garbage can below.  A counter counts cans, and of course it has to twitter/text/email after every can is smashed, and when the garbage can is nearly full and needs to be emptied.

The problem with can crusher 1.0 is that Ben hooked up with a Longhorn engineer instead of an Aggie engineer.

Lets see this thing done up right.

--steve

Geez, Folks, we need something spectacular here!

First, Ben should charge a nice, large bank of caps to a high-ish voltage. Then, using a trigerred spark gap, discharge the capacitors into a robust 1 or 2 turn coil, placed tightly around the can. Presto! One blown-apart coil, one crushed can =]

Of course, if you build it strongly enough, the coil will survive, but it's easier for the experiment if the coil is disposable. That way, the discharge current is actually set by the resistive losses in the circuit, together with a small amount of inductance. The inductance itself should be minimised to avoid resonance effects. We want ALL of the energy to hit the coil and be converted into an intense, but short-lived magnetic field. Too much heat will melt the can...

Someone elses idea.  http://hackaday.com/2007/10/15/electromagnetic-aluminum-can-crushing/

I think your idea of some type of piston being controlled by motor would work but maybe a small hydrolic setup would easily do the trick as well. Maybe have a stack of cans with a small slot on the bottom, the machine will crush one at a time and onces its crushed it falls through the small slot of the bottom, piston pulls back then the next can falls into the piston crushing spot, and repeat till the stack is done.. That way a weeks worth of pop or a days worth of beer cans can be stacked, flip on the switch and let it do it one after another. An electric eye can be used to watch for a can and each cycle can be counted by the same microcontroller.

Ben should use a false leg with a shoe on it and replicate the traditional way of crushing a can! Some sort of clamping mechanism would be needed to hold it in place then stomp on the can, lift the leg back to kick the can out the way and load up the next can for crushing!

We have built these before at my work in our spare time using old pnumatic air cylinders. 50lbs of air pressure is sufficent to crush even a large beer can. Get a cheapo compressor at lowes or use a cheap air compression pump and an old fire extinguisher for a tank. if you wanna get real fancy use a plc/prox switches/relays to send the signal when your can crusher is empty/loaded

How about going with the High School Physics method, a wheel that sprays some super heated water into the can, then rotates the can down into a bath of chilled water. Add a picker bar and catch at the top and you could crush 30 cans a minute!