King Kludge

Most of my hardware arrived, after an epic eBay session.

A couple of new Arduino shields, namely a motor driver board and a wave shield, although I'm actually planning on using the wave shield on a children's toy (possibly).

I spent a decent part of a day, last weekend, stripping old hard disk drives, CD ROM drives, floppy drives and old mice for components. Stepper motors, brushless DC drives and various other juicy hacking hardware.

I've also been looking for a guide on how to power and control a 5400rpm hard disk spindle motor.
It has four contacts, one ground and three coil energising connections.

Similarly to a stepper motor, these connections should be connected sequentially, the frequency of the pulses will allow you to control the spindle speed with high accuracy.