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It isn't enough for our products to teach you about one thing. We like to make something that will teach you about several things. If you understand how our heat engine works, for example, you know something about shape memory alloys, and heat and energy, and pulleys, and gears, and friction.

We are proud to announce the release of Dr. Johnson's Amazing Heat Engine. This is a device that turns heat into usable energy. It can run on solar-heated water, or waste heat from industrial processes, or the temperature difference between the warm water at the surface of the ocean and the colder deep ocean.

We also are partners with the premiere company making shape memory alloy (SMA) actuators, Dynalloy. One of their products is called Musclewire® We offer several different packets to help you learn about this fascinating and useful technology. And one simple demonstration- the space worm. You'll understand how it works, because we tell you, but your friends will be baffled.

We also provide a couple of kits for building interesting and informative items. You don't need to be an expert in electronics to make one of these, you just need to be able to get a soldering iron, some solder, and a few basic tools. They demonstrate some basics of analog circuitry, solar energy, leverage and mechanics, and shape memory alloy. Oh... and you learn to solder electronics parts, if you haven't done that before.

We also sell bare Shape Memory Wire. This is Flexinol®, made by Dynalloy. This is the best wire, developed for long life. To order you need to know

  • What transition temperature you need (we carry 90 degrees C and 70 degress C wire).
  • What diameter wire you want. This is always a balance between force, electrical requirements, etc.
  • How much wire you need

We sell the wire identified by a part number like Flexinol® 100HT- 1M. The "HT" means high temperature, i.e. 90 degrees C actuation. The 100 means 100 micron. If you want diameter in thousandths of an inch, divide by 25. 100 micron wire is .004 inches. The third identifier is either 1M or 5M, meaning you get one meter or five meters of wire.

We also sell the wire as a selection of shorter lengths of several different types of wire.

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©In-sight 2008
Bringing understanding of new and important scientific and technical subjects to the public.

We provide education products that teach new ideas, especially in science and technology. That includes, among other things, heat engines, Flexinol, nitinol, and Dr. Johnson's clean heat engine. We believe that real education, real understanding, real learning requires hands on experience. We believe that reaching insight comes from coming to a subject with the proper preparation and knowledge, keeping an honest curiousity, being open to surprise and change, and begin rigorous. By rigorous we mean to follow every test and experiment until we truly understand the results, even when the experiment leads us in a surprising direction.