Here are 2 new animations in GIF format for easier viewing.
I doubt, that it will work, but anyway..here they are.
here is the 3 disc version
What happened to www.butchlafonte.com?
It seems to be unavailable on my net connection.
newname perhaps?
yes, they chose a new name. see link:
http://energielibre.net/
I was surprised to see that the discs shown in the animations are quite similar than the discs that I have been using in my own experiments (see 'Half baked ideas' -> 'Interesting magnetic effect')...
I was doing some tests with two discs that had 4 magnets in each mounted symmetrically and all N poles facing each other. When installing the discs they accidentally turned to 45 degree phase angle with each other and snapped together so tight that I had to use a very big screwdriver and quite much force to separate them. To rotate one disc so that its N poles would have faced the N poles of the other disc would have required so much force that I couldn't do that.
Maybe we could get something useful out of this kind of discs. They aren't very difficult to manufacture.
-Olli