Among the many hobbyists who tried to reproduce David Hamel's magnet devices, one left an unusually candid public record. The rimstar.org project page titled "Hamel 45 Gallon Drum Experiment", carrying a 2011 copyright notice in the name of Steven Dufresne, sets out to duplicate the results Hamel claimed for a stack of magnet-rimmed cones sealed inside an oil drum. It is an overview page: it describes the basic device, lists the builder's own attempts, reprints Hamel's account of the original drum test, and warns readers away from a popular misunderstanding. What it does not contain is any report that the device worked.
What the builder set out to do, and what was built
The page lists three pieces of the builder's own work:
- The Hamel 45GD – Mark 1, described as a first attempt running from July to September 1999.
- The Hamel 45GD – Mark 2, described as the latest attempt, begun in April 2000; the page leaves the end date open.
- A variant that combined Mark 1 with Steve Thompson's motor approach. The page says this was abandoned because the gap between the cone rims and the drum rim was too wide, a problem the builder judged could not be solved.
The page also refers to a separate account of visits to Hamel. Its most important statement comes in an opening warning: the builder concedes that the drum has not yet been altered to match everything Hamel advised, and that doing so would require a fresh start that had not yet begun. The builder still counts the visits as worthwhile, since showing Hamel the finished builds is what produced the advice in the first place. Read plainly, though, the warning means that neither Mark 1 nor Mark 2 counts as a faithful test of Hamel's design, by the builder's own admission.
A second warning cuts the other way. The builder notes that people who claim success with this technology used designs that differ from Hamel's original, and suggests several configurations might work. The page names none of these claimants and gives no details of their results.
How the device is supposed to work
The idea, as the page presents it, rests on magnets pushing rather than pulling. Facing like poles hold each part away from its neighbour, the same principle the dossier calls rejection magnets. Once one part is nudged off balance, that disturbance is meant to pass through the whole assembly as a wobble, with each layer swinging against the one below it in alternating directions.
What starts the motion? The lid. The top cone carries one extra ceramic magnet at the centre of its rim, and a ceramic magnet set into the drum's cover repels it once the cover goes on, shoving the top cone off-centre.
How does it spread? The cones are nested, each resting on a point partway down the cone beneath it inside a 45 gallon drum. When one tips, the cone carrying it is meant to tip the opposite way, and so on down the stack.
What keeps the cones off the walls? Ceramic magnets around each cone's rim are repelled by rings of ceramic magnets fixed inside the drum.
What sits at the bottom? Most designs, the page says, rest the stack on a part usually called an oscillator rather than a simple fixed seat, so that it can wobble further.
How many cones? Hamel, the page reports, held that there should be three, although one of the claimed successes reportedly used two.
The builder links to a separate page setting out a personal theory of how this works; that theory is not set out here.
Hamel's original drum test, as retold
The page reprints a passage from The Granite Man & the Butterfly, the book Hamel told to Jeanne Manning, about the test of his first drum model at his home in Maple Ridge, British Columbia. The page's introduction says the passage's mention of something Hamel had seen before refers to his alien experience.
What Hamel says happened. A small, home-made version of the cone stack, sealed in a magnet-lined 45-gallon steel barrel, began wobbling when the lid was tightened and was left running when he and his wife Nora went to bed. They were woken by a loud bang and a red glow from the garage, and found that the device had blown apart out of the drum, damaging the roof and destroying thousands of dollars' worth of magnets, though nothing had caught fire. By the book's account, Hamel had expected little of the model: "It'll never fly. But maybe I can learn from it."
What can and cannot be checked. Nothing in the episode was measured or recorded, and no independent observer is named; it rests entirely on Hamel's story as told to Jeanne Manning. The book explains the glow as a buildup of some unspecified energy, which is an interpretation offered after the fact rather than a finding. It also describes the device's workings in the book's own vocabulary of lines that break apart under the lid's pressure, terms that are neither defined nor connected to any recognised physics.
The Hamel spinner warning
The page corrects a common misunderstanding. The builder reports that on one visit Hamel showed the so-called Hamel spinner and said it was meant to demonstrate the wobbling motion of the cones, not perpetual spinning of magnets. The builder applies the same point to the drum: its cones are supposed to wobble rather than rotate, and the motion is expected to be slight enough that it is commonly described as vibration. A broadly similar picture, from a different device, appears in Tracy Jones's motor-driven tests of a Hamel Flying Saucer wing, which recorded oscillations of about 1/4 inch and a centre magnet moving 1/8 to 1/4 inch without spinning.
What the page does and does not establish
The page shows that at least one builder made two drum devices in 1999 and 2000, took them to Hamel, and received design corrections that had not yet been put into practice at the time of writing. It gives a clear description of the nested-cone layout and passes on Hamel's statement that the device should wobble rather than spin.
It does not report any measured output, any lift, any run time or any successful result for Mark 1 or Mark 2. One variant is recorded as abandoned. The successful builds it mentions are unnamed and undocumented. The one dramatic event it describes, the exploding drum, comes from Hamel's own narrative and has no independent witness. The page also points readers to the Yahoo! hameltech discussion group for files and photographs. Dan LaRochelle, a core member of that group, told a 2004 magazine profile that many drum builds he knew of had failed (see Welcome to the Future (2004): A Magazine Visit to David Hamel in Gilmour, Ontario, and What His Own Supporters Said About the Saucer Motor).
How it fits the dossier
This record adds a first-hand entry to the replication history set out in Hamel Claims vs. Evidence: The Gravitomagnetic Drive, Forty Failed Replications and the Absence of Measurement. In that history, Dan LaRochelle counts as many as forty unsuccessful drum builds and Tracy Jones reports no lift. The Rimstar page fits the same pattern and adds one detail the others lack: the builder admits that these attempts were not yet a faithful copy of the design. For the larger device these drum experiments were meant to lead towards, see Hamel Flying Saucer (HFS) and Gravitomagnetic Drive Claim.
Source notes & attribution
- https://rimstar.org/sdprop/haml45gd/haml45gd.htm