Uses for Magnets

[bruce.desertrat]

I have one of those little round magnets on the top of my drill press, holds the chuck key right there.

A good source of scary strong magnets is old computer hard drives. They're fiddly to disassemble (but you then have a large collection of nice little 4-40 torx 8 screws as well) buy they're very strong and come conveniently (or inconveniently, depending on your needs) attached to a sturdy steel back with pre-drilled mounting holes. The best come out of old 3½" SCSI server grade drives. One I have in our kitchen holds about 30 pages of recipes to the fridge. attached are common examples.from a 2¼" laptop drive, some consumer grade drives and the thick ones are some of those server SCSI drives. You most definitely don't want those bigger ones tocome together at any speed, they shatter into a billion highly magnetic, razor-sharp shards.