Question

Take it apart and tell what happened. Oh yea, pics would be great.

That is weird, haha. I felt the same way when I moved in and saw a giant clunking R2D2 looking thing. The one here is huge, it actually has wheels so it's easier to move around. If I were to guess, even with the casing taken off, it's about 50 lbs.

I'm not exactly an expert but for the sake of curiosity I looked at it a little, just to give eesakiwi an idea. I have left over neodymium magnets from projects so I figured it best to use those. There is some brass piping inside. There definitely is a motor but not going to go into it much more due to time. The rest of the piping, etc and the cylinders themselves the magnet really didn't stick to. Since I'm not really educated in the matter I'm not going to mess around with the thing much more than that. So if you didn't rip it open yet you should find a decent enough surprise inside.

Even if you wanted to salvage it into something more useful you probably can. I did some googling and people did find creative ways to re-use the machines.