Now we are talking...

I have been thinking hard on this subject for a few days now. And most of the important stuff seems to have been talked about already. So I will not repeat loads of it.

Thinking more torque for a given input is way more important than how much you can recover by the collapsing field. This solenoid motor does seem to be able to create a lot of torque with a small input, but someone has to actually build one and then share the findings with us all.

like aaron said: let the eMagnet pull the piston in, and cut off the power before it reaches the endpoint. The collapsing field will result in one final big pull on the piston, and simultaneusly we can catch this pulse like tesla or john bedini did. (Take a look here if you want to see how tesla catched the collapsing field of a large inductor, to power a tesla-coil from a battery) so we both get to eat the cake and to have it still :-)

now add to this something that I have seen in the patents but are not quite so obvious: the solenoid housing is closed in the end where the piston goes in. this makes it practically an airspring. this is explained by tesla too (im a big fan of him ;-) in his mechanical steam or pressure oscillator. so when you cut of the power the spike will slam the piston towards the end, we catch the kick-back in a Cap, and the airspring will push the rod OUT! Dont forget, another solenoid is actually pulling at this right moment so the force of the airspring is ADDED to the force of the pulling emagnet. summa summarum: MORE TORQUE.
I believe that it is possible to build a motor that uses not very much electrical energy to run, wich creates a lot of torque, and that this engine can turn a conventional generator while recapturing some or most of the input energy. the generator will of course be delivering more out than we put into the motor... I really hope so...

Lars