Nova Magnetic Sweeper

Okay, so here is a quick overview of our new NOVA fork-mounted magnetic sweeper. This is a very similar model to our Upland magnet. It’s a bit wider—I believe the Upland was a 56; this is a 74-inch sweeping width. Along with the added width, you get a larger magnet. The magnet on this one is a 6×8 assembly, so 6 x 8 x 74 inches wide. That gives you your 74-inch sweeping width, and it will pick up a nail from a maximum height of 12 inches. That’s almost on par with our, um, almost on par with the Aardvark. It’s the Cayman, that kind of level of magnetism, so that’s far above what you actually need for picking up, like, a nail or a bolt or screws—or in this case, container locks.

We’re at the shipping container yard here, and these containers all come with locks on the doors which get cut off when they get here, so they’re littered all over the ground. Same thing at port facilities—that’s where we actually got the suggestion for this from. They wanted something that goes on the front of a forklift, that’s wide, and you can run fast. So you can run this thing fast because it’s got 11 inches of suspension travel. While these forks remain at this level, that magnet can move up and down 11 inches before it starts to lift or get stuck or anything like that, if you’re set in the correct position.

It also doesn’t impede any turning ability because it pivots on this huge 1 and 3/8-inch nut here, which has UHMW bushings. This allows the magnet to go 360° around the fork pocket assembly. While it goes 360°, it will not hit the forklift, so you can turn as tight as you want. As long as you’re not hitting these off the front of anything, your wheels will never—like, the wheel of the magnet is never going to touch the forklift. It’ll just pivot in circles indefinitely, and we don’t have to worry about that kind of thing.

Our request we got from the port was—they wanted speed, they wanted power, and with power comes speed. Like I said, this is like the Aardvark kind of a magnet. It can run and pick up these little pieces, like the nails, the bolts, the locks, that kind of thing—you can do that at high speeds (well, high speed for a forklift, anyways). Also, speed comes from the suspension. Like I said before, it allows you to go through any terrain you want without having to worry about bumps and what the forks are doing. You don’t have to feather your controls at all; you just kind of get on it and drive whatever speed you feel comfortable at, and the magnet should do its job to pick up anything in your path that you’re going to encounter.

Another thing the port wanted was an automatic clean-off, so they were interested in the Upland model, but the Upland model had a lever-actuated cleanup that you had to get off the forklift to use. This thing has a remote control, which corresponds to this antenna up here and sends power from that battery box to the two linear actuators on either side of the magnet. So this can be done from the seat of the forklift. You just raise this thing up over a dumpster—or wherever you want to dump your metal—and it will clean off automatically in about a 30-second cycle out and cycle back in.

The way the linear actuators work is, there’s, like I said, two of them on either side. They’ve got 450 lbs of pressure each, so when you lift this magnet up over a dumpster (or wherever you want to dump your stuff), press the button, they come down, and they swing our 14-gauge stainless steel debris pan away from the magnet housing. That separates any debris that’s stuck to the debris pan from the big magnetic field which is coming from this block down here, so it separates the pan from the block, which will in turn drop all the debris into wherever you want to dump it. That’s an automatic system.

It is battery-powered, so you do need a 12-volt battery. We have a Group 51 battery on here that will give you enough cycles for pretty much a whole shift. They don’t draw a lot of power. On the battery box, there is a voltage meter and an on and off switch, so when you’re done with it, you can shut it off, take the key out, and no one can turn it back on until you return the key to it. Your voltage gauge also gives you an idea of how much charge you have left, which lets you know if you need to charge it or not.

But yeah, we’ve got a 74-inch sweeping width, 6×8 magnet. The fork width here is 7 and 1/12 inches on the inner diameter, so it can accommodate forks up to 7 and a half inches wide because this is a fairly small forklift you’re using it on, but it is made for a larger one. So you can go faster, work harder, cover more ground—you’ve got the 74-inch sweeping width, plenty of sweeping width for most forklifts to stay outside of the wheels, so you’re sweeping before your forklift runs over. If you have pneumatic tires, that might be a difference for you.

What else we got here? Yep, and last thing I think I need to mention here is our upward clamping fork system. So these bad boys look like just a threaded rod going down onto the fork, but it’s actually backwards. The threaded rod just goes onto this plate here—I don’t know what you’d call that, it’s kind of like a bushing kind of plate thing—so the threaded rod is threaded through this coupler, it pushes against the top of the fork pocket on this brace joint, and there’s actually a piece underneath here that clamps upwards in this kind of a motion to push the bottom of the fork and make sure that the top of the fork is actually touching the top of this housing here. So that gives you a nice flat-to-flat surface you’re clamping together—a lot more stability. You know, everyone’s seen the pictures online of the fork pockets that are all bent from clamping stuff onto your forklift and hitting stuff. That’s not going to happen with this, because you’ve got a nice flat-to-flat clamping surface. These give you a nice firm hold on it—actual side-to-side stability, which the other ones don’t—and yeah, it’s just a lot better system.

The only other features I can think to point out here are the height adjustment of the wheels. So this is a 16 1/2-inch wheel with sealant in it, so if you do get any nails with it, it’ll seal itself shut up to, I believe, a 1/4 inch or 3/8 of an inch hole, and that’s got an adjustable sweep height by unbolting the spindle it’s attached to from the main housing of the magnet. There are four positions you can adjust—just move the height of the wheel, that’ll adjust the sweeping height to give you from 1 to 4 inches of sweeping height. Once you set that, that height is maintained over any terrain you can get a forklift through. I don’t know what forklift you can get that can go through 11 inches of suspension travel, but you’ve got 11 inches of suspension travel and 360° of pivot.

So this thing has our ground tracking suspension, so it just finds its way through whatever you’re doing. It can go side to side and go in and out, and go up and down 11 inches. No matter how much your forklift is bouncing, you don’t have to worry about those forks—just let them go. As long as you’re comfortable sitting on a forklift, I think you can go through anything that you can get a forklift through with this thing.

Other than that, it’s a—you know, we clean up this yard here. We got a lot of locks, got a lot of slag, because they do repairs on shipping containers here as well as just selling them and moving them around, so we picked up some slag from them cutting off stuff, stuff cutting up stuff, and, um, yeah, got some nails, got a lot of big spikes out of the ground, got some bolts, that sort of thing. But yeah, this is our new NOVA magnetic sweeper by Blue Streak Equipment. All parts should be available online, and these will be ready to sell as soon as I get this video edited.

Oh, and for attaching, it’s got parking stands on the back—just drop it down, it’ll stay where you want, you just run into it and pick it back up again, and that’s it.