Big-Magnet Uses
Keep a big magnet on hand to make daily tasks a bit easier.
One day after painting the front of a house for eight hours, I looked at my painfully cramped hand and started thinking about alternative ways to hold a paint can. For some reason, my big magnet came to mind. I had bought it several years earlier when I dropped my new Hart hammer into an old pocket-door wall cavity while working in an attic.
The next day, I stuck it to the bottom of my cut-bucket paint can, and it worked great. Mine has a 3-1/4-in.-square base and an aluminum frame with three horseshoe-shaped handles connected by a bar. Except for the bottom surface, the whole assembly is finished with a bright-orange PVC coating.
My hand wraps around the bar and through the horseshoes, with the palm pointing up. Maybe not the perfect grip, but a world of improvement over the other ways I usually hold a paint bucket. Because the hand is directly under the bucket, little cantilevered force affects my hand. The bucket is always less than half full, and the magnet’s strength is more than enough to lean a bit without dropping the bucket.
After this success, I started thinking about other uses for the big magnet, such as a featherboard for holding a workpiece against a tablesaw fence during a cut. Recalling a magnetic featherboard that I had seen in a catalog, I scrounged a 5-1/2 in. by 15-in. scrap of cypress and cut a 45° angle on one end. I cut the featherboard’s fingers on this end; then I put the magnet on the other end of the board, traced its outline, and cut it out. A little bit of rasping produced a snug fit for the magnet. I applied a coat of epoxy to the corners of this mortise to reinforce the split-prone cypress.
In use, the magnet’s hold to the cast-iron table is terrific and hard to pull off. But it can be slid fairly easily for cut adjustments.
— John Michael Davis; New Orleans, LA
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This article is from 2004. Edmund Scientific is nothing like the old ES. It does have a lot of optics, but the rest of the company is dedicated to marketing educational kits for schools. No more giant magnets. Anyway, a tiny magnet could do the job today.
Yup. I miss the old Edmund Scientific catalog.
Just like I miss the Johnson & Smith, Warshawsky catalogs, and all the other golden oldies.
...and Radio Shack. These days it's Grainger or Harbor Freight.
... or Amazon, eBay & various China outlets.