# Drum Magnet



## rusty (Oct 30, 2010)

At first I thought of using the flexible magnets used on the doors of refrigerators and freezers to build a drum magnet but found the magnets too weak and have since found a suitable alternative.

I have a large assortment of stepper motors collected from photo copiers that have odd ball shafts such as the one shown in the picture below it has a worm gear milled onto the armature shaft rendering it useless for most cnc projects.

Stepper motors come on larger sizes which would have a larger armature with larger magnets so your options are not limited.

The armature has four rare earth magnets much more powerful than the fridge magnets, the magnets on the armature will slip off individually then these can be ganged up then inserted inside a stainless steel or PVC pipe to make a drum magnet.

The drum magnet will have a small scraper affixed at a point to remove magnetic particles as they meet the scraper, the drum and conveyor can be manually or electrically operated depending on where you would like to use it.

For this that have black sands in their mining concentrates or mud recovered from milled IC scrap a drum magnet could save a lot of time.

What I envision for the manually operated drum magnet is something akin to a hand cranked drum carder used for carding wool. The only difference is that you would have a short conveyor built into the system.

The ideal conveyor belting and rollers could be salvaged from an exercising walking machine, I see plenty of these in the landfill sites on a regular basis. I save the belting from all I find.

Drum magnets are expensive as I see it no need to spend that hard earned cash, build your own.

A simple drum magnet at work.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jrxW4DLdfc[/youtube]


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## Barren Realms 007 (Oct 30, 2010)

Here is some thing that might work for the magnet. Next time you are at the dump and see a garbage disposal et it and tear it apart. You will find some large rare earth magnets on the inside perimiter of the housing. They are fragile so you might want to be careful when you knock them out. You can usually take a screwdriver and put it between the housing and the magnet and with a couple of taps knock it out. Some times it will come out whole and sometimes it will break into pieces.


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## rusty (Oct 30, 2010)

Barren Realms 007 said:


> Here is some thing that might work for the magnet. Next time you are at the dump and see a garbage disposal et it and tear it apart. You will find some large rare earth magnets on the inside perimiter of the housing. They are fragile so you might want to be careful when you knock them out. You can usually take a screwdriver and put it between the housing and the magnet and with a couple of taps knock it out. Some times it will come out whole and sometimes it will break into pieces.



Would the magnets from a garbage disposal unit fit into a pipe, could you post some pictures - thanks


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## Barren Realms 007 (Oct 30, 2010)

rusty said:


> Barren Realms 007 said:
> 
> 
> > Here is some thing that might work for the magnet. Next time you are at the dump and see a garbage disposal et it and tear it apart. You will find some large rare earth magnets on the inside perimiter of the housing. They are fragile so you might want to be careful when you knock them out. You can usually take a screwdriver and put it between the housing and the magnet and with a couple of taps knock it out. Some times it will come out whole and sometimes it will break into pieces.
> ...



They should be able to fit into a piece of 3" or 4" pipe. I will see about tearing one apart and taking some pictures of the magnet.


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