A subject that I was quite interested in a few years ago...
I\'ve read a lot of stuff about \'free energy\' (or \'new energy\' or whatever you want to call them...) devices, but never persevered enough to seriously experiment with them.
From the stuff I\'ve read, I believe there\'s an unfortunate \'catch-22\' that arises with these machines. The people who are able to make them work are those who *don\'t* have formal education in physics / electrical engineering etc., who just tinker with things in their back yard, and trust their instincts and what they see with their own eyes. They often spend years perfecting their designs to isolate and optimise the \'free energy\' effect they\'re using, and over that time develop their own theory of what\'s actually happening. But then, having developed their own understanding, they have great difficulty explaining it to anyone else. Often they can\'t explain it at all; they have no idea *how* it works, they only know that it does.
Add to that the skepticism/cynicism of mainstream scientists (\"This is a load of rubbish because I say so and I\'ve got a PhD so I know what I\'m talking about\"... but you\'ll never hear them say it in quite those words!). Millions of dollars are poured into \'hot\' nuclear fusion research, but nobody with the money wants to fund research into known devices claimed to deliver \'free energy\' - even though it could potentially deliver much bigger results for much less money. It seems to research anything in science, one must already be able to \'prove\' it... which makes progress glacially slow.
Then the confusion of the \'free energy\' field itself, with so many different devices that may or may not actually work, and so many different theories.
Then the fact that the effects that make these machines work always(?) seem to be very elusive - the magnets have to be in exactly the right places and the right size, the voltages have to be just right, etc. Most back-yard inventors have neither the money nor the patience to do the amount of trial and error required.
Then the greed of the inventors themselves (\"I want to keep this secret and make loads of money from it\") which prevents most of them from releasing the full details needed to replicate their experiments, and the ego problems they often develop (\"I\'m going to save the world!\").
Then the large number of machines which don\'t actually work - where the inventor has measured wrong and thinks they\'re getting \'free energy\' where they\'re not, or where the machine didn\'t scale up as straightforwardly as expected - or of course, where it\'s an outright fraud.
And finally, physical suppression. Inventors of \'free energy\' devices having their houses / workshops broken into and things destroyed or stolen, or the inventors themselves being threatened, or even murdered. Go and look for information about Stanley Meyer, who was poisoned just after he\'d received a large grant for cold fusion research... (and I very much doubt it\'s \'the government\' as such is responsible... more likely rogue elements in government agencies, and criminal gangs, working in cooperation with the oil companies).
Add all that together, and it\'s pretty hard for any serious research to take place. I hope the Internet can help change that, but I won\'t hold my breath... (and that introduces another trap to fall into: it\'s much easier to talk about things on-line than to actually do experiments! And I have no room to complain here!)
Anyway... here\'s some (hopefully) interesting links: - also search for the names of the people / machines to find more.
http://www.cheniere.org - Tom Bearden has spent more than 30 years trying to fit together theory of \'vacuum energy\' and is convinced that there\'s a lot of serious flaws in existing EM theory. His articles get into heavy particle physics stuff and are too far removed from reality to build a real device from, but if you\'re interested in theory, take a look.
(also search for \"Tom Bearden\" on Google to find more - his paper \"The Final Secret of Free Energy\" is a good place to start)
http://www.geocities.com/theadamsmotor/cdmotor.html - Tim Harwood\'s replication of the Adams motor with CDs and cheap readily available parts. Apparently instead of heating up, it actually sucks in heat from its surroundings!
http://www.zpenergy.com - a \'free energy\' news portal
http://www.zpenergy.com/modules.php?name=Downloads&d_op=MostPopular - several papers about various \'free energy\' devices and topics
http://www.keelynet.com/tilley/tillwilson.htm - Can it really be this simple? I tried building something like this using 3 motors (2 of them in \'reverse\' as generators) and a car wheel, and it didn\'t produce any \'free energy\'. (Hatchnet - this machine sounds similar to what you described - can you tell us any more?)
http://freeenergynews.com/Directory/MagneticMotors/ - big list of motors claimed to gain power from permanent magnets.
http://jlnlabs.free.fr/ - Jean-Louis Naudin\'s energy and propulsion experiments. All of them professionally done and well documented. Most recently he claims to have achieved over-unity results from a new variety of \'cold fusion\' reactor.
http://peswiki.com/index.php/Main_Page - a \'Wiki\' site about free energy systems.
http://www.remnantsaints.com/AlternativeUtilities/Transportation/Bob_Boyce/ - Bob Boyce is one of a few people claiming to have made a car run on water, by using electrolysis with resonant frequencies that produces much more hydrogen/oxygen with far less energy that normal.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/watercar - Yahoo group for discussion of water-powered vehicles. Frank Roberts from this group claimed to have a working device with electrolysis with a simple pulsed 12V, but I haven\'t checked recently to see if anything else has happened.
I experimented a little bit with pulsed electrolysis, but didn\'t notice anything interesting... but I never got as far as trying to replicate Frank Roberts\' or Bob Boyce\'s device.
http://www.intalek.com/Index/Projects/Research/Dragone.pdf - \"Energetics of Ferromagnetism\" by Leon Dragone. A simple and quite easily understandable of how it should be possible to extract energy from a permanent magnet, which will then replenish it from whatever source powers permanent magnets. Dragone claims at the end that he built a working motor and solid-state device from this theory - unfortunately he didn\'t give any details, and having died of a heart attack in 1988, isn\'t around to ask any more.
Did I really write that much?!!!
(I\'ll be away until Monday so can\'t reply to anything until then)