October 15, 20169 yr I blew a forklift tire the other day on an unseen piece of metal. Thank goodness it was the rear. For those of you without forklifts, tires are not cheap. Especially the front ones. Then someone I had never seen before said they picked up a screw in the yard (2 acres of cement and storage buildings). Not being customers they had no business being on the property and had no reasonable explanation why they were on the lot. I regularly police the yard for screws as do others. Clearly I was missing stuff. I looked at large magnet sweepers for forklifts and they are expensive. So, off to Harbor freight. I picked up two 30 inch sweepers for under 80 dollars. Zip tied them to the forks and off I went. Holy cow there was a lot of metal out there.
October 15, 20169 yr Put a plastic bag over the magnets. When you get finished collecting, reverse the bag and capture the junk. It makes for easy clean up and keeps the magnet clean and free of whiskers.
October 15, 20169 yr This is genius... I'm baffled that this never occurred to me. Even for a shop magnetic pickup.
October 15, 20169 yr Author the magnets are in an aluminum housing. You pull up on a handle and the magnets lift off the bottom off the aluminum and everything comes off. I was surprise. No metal fuzzies. remained.
October 16, 20169 yr Wes, Magnet in a bag works very well around drills and lathes to pick up those sharp little pieces of metal that dig into your flesh as you try to clean them up using other methods. Use the magnet in a bag trick in the shop to clean up work tables, the floor etc after you sweep. You will be surprised how much metal the broom missed.
October 19, 20169 yr Glenn's idea reminds me of a trick I picked up as an electrician. Whenever I was drilling a box or panel tub I would stick my magnetic torpedo level on the inside of the box near where I was drilling. The chips stuck to the outside of the box opposite the magnet. Once I was done drilling, I could put something to catch the chips under the hole and release them by removing the level. As an added plus, the level tended to reduce vibration in the boxes during drilling which made it a lot less noisy. Just don't make the mistake of sticking the level in the same pocket as your credit cards. I did that an embarrassing number of times.
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