A week or so ago I googled "preon binding force" and turned up an article by Jogesh Pati, the originator of the term "preon," according to wikipedia:

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1981PhLB...98...40P

Magnetism as the origin of preon binding

Pati, Jogesh C.

Physics Letters B, Volume 98, Issue 1-2, p. 40-44.

It is argued that ordinary ``electric''-type forces - abelian or nonabelian - arising within the grand unification hypothesis are inadequate to bind preons to make quarks and lepton unless we proliferate preons. It is therefore suggested that the preons carry electric and magnetic charges and that their binding force is magnetic. Quarks and leptons are magnetically neutral. Possible consistency of this suggestion with the known phenomena and possible origin of magnetic charges are discussed.

(The article can be downloaded without fee here.)


So, apparently, I am not the first to think preons might be bound magnetically.  However, in order to achieve magnetic binding, the above article postulates that preons possess magnetic charges, which are not required by the mechanism I propose.

I decided to write a short paper on how electrical charges even of like polarity can be magnetically bound according classical electrodynamics, without going extensively into the relativistic kinematics arguments, to submit to a journal as soon as possible.  I thought I could just excerpt that part of my paper as it's currently posted on arxiv, but now I'm wanting to elaborate a little bit further, taking better account of retardation and perhaps looking at how it acts in time symmetric electrodynamics (i.e., allowing for time-advanced as well as time-retarded interaction).  Properly accounting for retardation makes things much more complicated and possibly intractable, but it is impossible to argue that it's negligible in this case.  It is thus not going as quickly as I'd initially hoped.