Magnetic + Mechanical + Sensor Based Sorting & Cleaning Solutions
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The Seeker Airmag FOD Control Magnetic Sweeper is built for clearing metal FOD from airfields and aprons at high speeds. The Seeker Airmag FOD Control Magnetic Sweeper was developed with input from multiple international airports, therefore it has all the features needed to make cleaning up metal FOD at an airport as efficient as possible.
The Seeker Airmag Airfield Magnetic Sweeper can be ordered as a single unit with a 60” inch sweeping width or a triple setup that gives a full 15’ foot sweeping width. The triple setup allows for faster coverage of large areas and uses multiple link bars to keep the magnets stable while towing. The Seeker Airmag can be towed at 10-25 km/h (5-15mph) while still picking up metal debris because of the low sweeping height and powerful magnet assembly. Pickup performance of the seeker has been systematically tested and measured, please refer to the Seeker speed testing results.
The 12” D x 3” H x 60” W inch permanently charged alternating pole C8 ceramic magnet that powers the Seeker Airmag provides more concentrated pickup power that is unmatched in the FOD control industry. This magnet is contained in a stainless-steel housing and can pick up a 2.5” inch nail from 10.5” inches off the ground, providing exceptional pickup power in the 1”-3” inch operational range (view Gauss information here).
The sweeping height can be easily adjusted and set within this range to the lowest possible that still allows all obstacle clearance on site. Each unit of the Seeker Airmag FOD Control Magnetic Sweeper has (12” x 60”)720 square inches of magnetic surface area that gives metal debris more space to collect on the magnet. This allows for more metal to be collected before the magnet needs to be cleaned off.
Price range: $26,979.99 through $80,869.99
See Pricing For All Models Below
$26,979.99 USD
$26,979.99 USD
$26,979.99 USD
$80,869.99 USD
$80,869.99 USD
$80,869.99 USD
| Seeker Airmag Series | Seeker Airmag 60 | Seeker Airmag 180 |
|---|---|---|
| SKU | SAM60F | SAM180T |
| Maximum Lifing Height | 10.5″ (using a 2.5″ nail) | 10.5″ (using a 2.5″ nail) |
| Sweeper Weight | 1,145 lbs | 3,451 lbs |
| Sweeper Width | 60″ | 180″ |
| Sweeping Height Adjustment | Yes. 1″ – 3″ | Yes. 1″ – 3″ |
| Sweeper Wheel Type | Carlisle 16.5″ x 6.5″ flat proof hub and spindle, 5 bolt spindles rated at 2000 lbs each | Carlisle 16.5″ x 6.5″ flat proof hub and spindle, 5 bolt spindles rated at 2000 lbs each |
| Clean Off Method | Manual push down counterweight assisted | Manual push down counterweight assisted |
| Tongue Weight | 20 lbs | 20 lbs |
| On Board Debris Containment | Standard, using 2 five gallon buckets | Standard, using 2 five gallon buckets |
| Terrain Surface | Paved | Paved |
| Pricing Range | $26,979.99 USD | $80,869.99 USD |
Seeker Airmag 60 Heavy Duty Construction
A: 3/8” (0.375”) thick steel side plates with lifting points
B: 3/16” (0.1875”) thick frame tube
C: 14 gauge (0.074”) thick 304 stainless steel bottom plate
D: 3/16” (0.1875”) thick tongue tube
E: 2.5” 10 ton forged steel pintle ring
F: 1/8” (0.125”) thick steel tongue strut tubes
G: ¾” (0.75”) thick module link hooks
H: 16.5” x 6.5” air filled wheels
I: 18 gauge (0.05”) thick steel covers
J: 3/16” (0.1875”) thick handle tube with ¼”(0.25”) thick ribs and gussets
K: 2.5” solid steel counterweight
Seeker Airmag 60 Dimensions Front View
Seeker Airmag 60 Dimensions Back View
Seeker Airmag 180 Dimensions Front View
Seeker Airmag 180 Dimensions Back View
Seeker Airmag 180 Ground Tracking
A: Radius
Seeker Airmag 180 Ground Tracking
A: Radius
Seeker Airmag 60 Guass Measurements
A: A= Distance from Magnet (Sweeping Height)
Note: Gauss (G) shown as the peak gauss measured in the center of the magnet at each distance.
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Price range: $19,999.99 through $34,999.99
$26,019.99
$26,019.99
$26,019.99
Check out the Seeker Airmag in action cleaning up runways and aprons at some of the biggest international airports .
The Seeker Airmag FOD Control Magnetic Sweeper was developed in association with the London International Airport and the Toronto Pearson International Airport in Ontario Canada. Throughout the development of this industry leading magnetic sweeper, Bluestreak Equipment consulted the airport’s maintenance crews and managers to determine which features are needed to create the best FOD control magnet for airfield and apron cleaning possible. The highspeed sweeping capability enables the operator to clear areas quickly and get off runways in a hurry if needed. Check out this video for a more in-depth explanation of the Seeker Airmag’s features and specifications.
the new Seeker Air Mag FOD control
magnetic sweeper. This is our new airport-specialized magnetic sweeper, loosely based on the Piranha concept. So this magnet is about twice as powerful as our existing Piranha Series. It’s a 12-inch by 3-inch ceramic magnet. The reason we did that is because a 12-inch magnet has a lot more surface area, and it’s 3 inches high because the field doesn’t need to extend that long—this thing only operates at a maximum of 3 inches.
Sweeping height is adjusted by these cranks, one on either side, and there’s a scale here with 1, 2, 3 inches marked out on it, with what looks like quarter-inch increments. So you just crank these one way or the other, and that raises or lowers the wheel so you are able to adjust your sweeping height. You just make sure these are even on both sides, and it’s indicated by a grease nipple here, which you can grease, obviously, to make the rotation smooth if needed.
So this magnet is a 12 by 3 ceramic magnet. It’s permanently charged, it won’t ever need maintenance, and it’ll last forever. It’ll pick up a 2 1/2-inch, 8-penny nail from a height of 10 1/2 inches. So with that pickup height, and you’re in the 3-inch sweeping range that we give you, 1 to 3 inches, there’s plenty of power to pick up any kind of debris you’re going to find on an airfield. We’re up here in Canada at the London airport right now. The major debris out here is actually bristles from a snow brush. They go out with the snow brush and clear off the runways in the winter—because you know, planes don’t stop for snow—and those bristles go everywhere, they’re absolutely everywhere.
We went out to the fire training facility over there, and there’s no reason they don’t brush it out there, but there are still bristles. So once we get all this material collected, to clean it off, you just use this big lever here. This lever on top is a 2 1/2-inch solid piece of steel, and you might wonder, “Why do you need this as a solid piece just for a handle?” Well, the idea is it counterweights the magnet. This is basically just a little L bracket that’s hooked to the top of the magnet housing, so when you pull it down, it pulls the magnet up and away from the stainless steel debris pan, which separates any debris you collected from the magnetic field, dropping it onto the ground.
So once it’s all dropped on the ground, you just pull your truck forward, and then included on the Seeker, every one that you buy comes with a Power Stick Pro Elite. This is our rare earth little broom-sweeping kind of thing. It’s the easiest way to pick up debris, especially if you’re on gravel or any grass or something like that where you can’t see every little piece. You just run it over whatever debris you collected, and then that can be deposited into these onboard bins.
So the bins even have lids and little bungee cords retaining them. You get one, two per Seeker order. These come in singles, or you can order a triple setup which gives you a 15-foot sweeping width. So you’ve got these buckets on here, you pick up all your collected debris with the power stick—there’s no bending over, no sweeping, nothing like that. It’s really easy. There are just rubber latches to hold the power stick on; it’s very secure, so this isn’t going to come off while you’re driving. Get your power stick off, pick everything up off the ground, throw it in the bucket, throw your lids back on, and then there’s just bungee cords that hold these down, as well as gravity.
There you go—ready to start sweeping again. You just pull this magnet up. Now, it does magnetize to the top of the frame, so it takes a bit of a pull, like you probably saw. There’s a metal bar here that the magnet housing actually sticks to when it’s in the top position, so you don’t have to hold it down the whole time. You set it down and just leave it, and then when you’re ready to sweep again, lower it back down and the magnet will be at the bottom of the pan, ready to sweep again.
So this magnet has our WRA round function. All that means is the magnet housing inside this body here is actually touching the back of the debris pan. So the magnet comes down, swings, and it touches the back of the debris pan. If you have any debris on the bottom of your pan and you hit grass or gravel or whatever, the material will come to the bottom of the pan and then snap back up to the rear of the pan, so you don’t lose anything if your stuff gets brushed off the main face of the magnet.
The WRA round function is great. We just took it through gravel, swiping the ground a little bit just because the surface is uneven. This is meant for flat surfaces, but at the end of the day, it’s a powerful magnet—10 1/2- or 12-inch pickup height—and you can adjust it to 3 inches. It’s got a stainless steel pan, so it’ll be fine for gravel as long as it’s relatively smooth.
On either side of the magnet, we’ve got Carlisle flat-free wheels. These are 16 1/2-inch wheels and they have a 2,000 lb, 5-bolt rated hub and spindle assembly on them, so it’s just like anything you’d see on a normal trailer—like a car, front or rear tire, or any normal trailer. It’s an actual hub with a spindle and a wheel bearing; it’s not just some slip-on thing, so it’s very heavy duty.
The magnet itself only weighs about 1,100 lb, so when you have a 2,000 lb-rated hub and spindle on either side, it’s overbuilt for what this trailer is, so it shouldn’t have any problem with air. The entire assembly is all steel and stainless steel, and every single surface on this thing is powder coated. There’s only one piece that’s painted, and that would be the magnet assembly. The stainless steel inside the body here—because the magnet assembly is made of stainless steel—inside this body where it’s protected by everything, that’s the only piece that’s painted. Everything else is powder coated.
This thing comes standard with the lights and fenders package, so it comes with these trailer lights. If you’re running at night, and you need the lights on, you’ve got turn signals, brakes, whatever; it just operates off normal four-pin trailer wiring harness. You’ve got these flags on here. These are just for—well, they look nice—but these are just so when you’re backing up, you can see it, because the trailer is really low. If you’re backing up, this just lets you see in your mirrors where you are.
Included, like I said before—you’ve got your power stick, got your buckets. It comes standard with a pintle ring hitch, and we also sell a system to attach three of these together. So individually, it’s only a 5-foot sweeping width, it’s only 60 inches, and that would be from here to back here, that’s 5 feet. When you attach three of them together, they overlap over this wheel—so basically, this panel here is where the wheel rides. When you attach three of them together, the one in front of it or behind it will catch—there’s no missed spots. The full 15-foot sweeping width overlaps, so there’s nothing that’s going to slip by.
Also, with these magnet assemblies, the way they’re built is it’s an alternating pole assembly. Think of it as two 6-inch wide magnets: one of them’s South, like the South Pole is pointing down, and one of them, the North Pole is pointing down. What that does is, they kind of pull on each other and it makes a very concentrated magnetic field. So in that 3-inch operating range, you can run this thing up to 30 km an hour—I think it’s about 12 or 15 for our American friends—and it’s got no problem. We did basically the whole runway: we went one way down to the other end of the airport, and then all the way up through the taxiway to the other side near their fire training area. It took a grand total of probably half an hour. We spent 15 minutes just waiting for planes to clear so we could drive.
It’s a very quick cleaning system. When you can drive that fast—you need to be able to drive that fast on airports, because you’ve got limited time on that runway. You probably see behind me there are planes landing and taking off all the time. So if you’re driving a truck out with a trailer on that runway, you better be off that thing quick. There’s no time for stopping and cleaning and whatever. That’s why we’ve got that 12-inch magnet assembly—it’s nice and wide, so there’s a lot of surface area that the magnet can actually collect debris on. You don’t get a situation where it’s a very narrow magnet and it just starts to pile up; it’s nice and wide, so that stuff can spread out and you can hold on to more without losing as much magnetic power.
And then, while we’re out there—because when you have a magnet and you’re picking up metal debris, every single piece that collects is going to take down the potential power of your magnet just because it has to use some of it to hold that debris. So that’s why we got this onboard system which is—you know, it’s just a bucket—but still, it’s an onboard system. When we went to the other side, pulled off the runway, and we’re out of the area where traffic is, cleaned it off, you’ve got a nice clean magnet for your return run. So you always make sure you’re at the best potential pickup power you can be by keeping that magnet clean.
It’s a pretty easy process. It’d be easier if you have two people, just because someone’s going to pull the truck forward, someone’s going to do the rest. But like I said, just pop your power stick out, pop the bucket top off, clean it all out, takes no time at all.
You hook three of them together, it’s got just a couple brackets they link on the front. There are these hitches—I don’t know if you can see that—but there are little receivers here that latch to the front of the following sweepers, and then there’s a bracket at the back that ties the two rear ones together so they don’t start swaying. It’s a very secure system. We had it out there. You’ll see in the other videos how it works, but this thing is our newest part of the Seeker FOD management system. We’re going to be having a couple other Seeker line FOD control pieces coming out soon. This is the first one—this is the magnet—because we’re familiar with magnets, so we got a magnet for the first shot. Just a new and improved one—way better than the Piranha, way better than anything else on the market right now. More power, easier handling, easier clean-off—you don’t have to deal with the little levers and stuff like that. Comes with lights, comes with wheels, comes with the nice flags, comes with the hitch, comes with the wiring.
It’s very simple to assemble. When you get this thing shipped to you, all you have to do is just bolt on the tongue—that’s a grand total of five bolts. Pretty easy—we had it together in a span of like five minutes. Oh, I guess you have to put the pintle ring in on your height, but that’s not assembly at that point, that’s adjustment.
So yeah, there’s the new Seeker Air Mag. It’s quite a unit. Now, we’ve been developing it—not in partnership, but with input from the London International Airport, like we are here, and also the Pearson International Airport in Toronto. They’ve been going back and forth with us over the last couple of months, just for the features they wanted: what’s useful, what’s not, what they need, what doesn’t need to be on there—like, for example, London says they don’t need these lights, but other people say they do, so we got them.
This thing’s just been refined over the last couple of months. It’s really come together as a good unit, and it’s the best magnetic airport FOD sweeper on the market that you can get today. All parts are available online. You can basically build this whole thing from scratch if you order all the parts. I wouldn’t recommend it because it’s a pain, but anything you break on here, you can replace it at Bluestreakequipment.com.
The Seeker Airmag FOD Control Magnetic Sweeper is available in three distinct color options to accommodate civilian and military applications. The chassis of the Seeker Airmag is powder coated matte black while the hood of the sweeper is available in three powder coat colors: Traffic Orange, Sand, and Army Green. The Sand and Army Green colors have matte finishes, and the Traffic Orange color has a gloss finish.
The Seeker Airmag is easily maneuverable through tight spaces around gates on airport aprons and can cover areas quickly, this makes it easy to stay out of the way of other vehicles on the apron while collecting FOD that accumulates from shipping and broken luggage that can turn into a projectile hazard if caught in a jet blast. The Seeker is shown here sweeping the gates at Pearson international airport.
All right, here at the Toronto Pearson International Airport, we got our new Seeker AirMag FOD Control magnetic sweeper. We’ve been working with Pearson over the last couple of months to develop a new magnetic sweeper specifically for airports, and based on their input of what they wanted, this is what we’ve come up with. We got the Seeker triple setup on the back of that truck, and we’re just going to run through their apron, give it a good once-over with the magnet, and then I think we’ll come back here and clean it off to see what we’ve collected. There’s probably some stuff—there’s a lot of activity around here, a lot of shipping, a lot of people boarding obviously—so you can get zippers lost off luggage, that sort of thing. So this is just our best effort to pick it up.
This magnet’s a triple setup, which gives you a full 15 ft sweeping width. Because you can see how busy this place is, you want to make sure you get in and out quickly. So we told them the recommended towing speed is about 10 to 15 km/h. We’ve had this one personally up to about 35, and it works fine. It’s got a magnet that’s twice as strong as our Piranha series, which used to be the gold standard for airport cleaning, and now this is the new standard. So these things have a 12×3 magnet in it with alternating pole assemblies, so it creates a really strong field in that little 3-inch sweeping height we give you so that you can effectively clean with all kinds of speed in an airport setting. As these guys said, we were talking about going on the runway, and they said if you’re out there and we need to, you know, jump ship and get the hell out of Dodge, how long’s it going to take? It doesn’t take time at all—you just get in and drive.
So they just did one little pass there that took maybe a minute and a half. They could cover this whole area in probably the span of half an hour, depending on the traffic of planes coming in and out. So you see, this is a working airport, so we got planes going all over the place here. There’s a nice jet—look at that, beautiful.
Seeker, so this thing has Carel flat-free wheels on it. They’re 16 1/2 by 5, I believe—5.50 maybe—and these come as either a single assembly, like a single piece for a 5 ft sweeping width, or a 15 ft triple setup so you can get 15 ft of continuous magnetic pickup power. So there’s no gaps; the thing overlaps where the wheels are, so you don’t have any gaps in your magnetic power.
So once we get this apron kind of cleaned up, we’ll get out of here, and I think we’re going to hop on one of the runways. Runways, obviously, are pretty hard to get at unless you’re on night offs or something like that, but they’re going to shut one down for us for about 20 minutes so we can get out there and run this thing up and down and see what’s what. These guys say they mainly only do the apron cleanup because that’s where all the activity is going on, so that’s where you’re going to get the most FOD. So this is a good setup for that because you can get it done quickly; it’s a nice easy job, and because it’s got such a powerful magnet in it and it’s got so much surface area—the magnet is 2,160 cubic inches—so it will hold on to a ton of debris. These guys can basically do the whole lot, I believe, without doing a clean-off cycle and then still be reliably picking stuff up at, you know, 10 to 15 km/h.
So when you’re on the runway, you’re obviously going to go faster—30, 40 is probably what you want to do depending on, you know, results may vary. You might be able to take it as fast as you want. But yeah, you see how busy this place is; these guys got to get in and out, and if you need to jump ship to get out of the way of a plane, you can do that with this thing. It’s got a high top speed on it, so you don’t have to be a problem for the planes coming in.
So the main debris you’re going to get at an airport is, um, there’s snow wire or snow brush bristles. So the brush big trucks use to clear snow off the runway have steel bristles on them, and those things get lost all the time. So you have to be careful to pick those up—make sure you pick them up, otherwise, you will possibly suck one into an engine, which would be not good for anybody.
These guys came to us earlier in the year—yeah, in like spring—and they got a Piranha from us because that was the best thing we had at the time for what they were doing. Then we’ve worked with them over the year just to develop and tweak this design so it’s got what they need. They said they wanted the lights on it; London said they didn’t want the lights. So we gave them the lights—thing comes with the lights from the factory and all the fenders. If you buy it as a single setup, you just get the one sweeper, but if you buy as a triple setup, you get all three sweepers with the bracket system to hook them all together.
They’re in the apron now, and we are running the Seeker on a couple more gates. So you see this thing’s working its way around this apron, they’ve already collected a bunch of debris; these guys are kind of shocked how much we picked up already, and it’s only been, you know, five minutes. So we’re going to do a couple more gates here—we got 169 down to 161 open, so at that point we can take it back up to the maintenance area probably and clean all the debris off of it. So we’ll probably get a video of that cleaning off, and we’ll see what the guys think about how much we’ve collected only just going about 10–15, which isn’t very fast. But once we get out on the—I just heard it pick something up—once we get out on the runway, we’ll grab the speeds back up.
And there she goes—look at that, right beside the big old Air Canada jet, there’s a plane just ready to board here. Yeah, nice to see something working where it’s supposed to be working, there. A nice jet behind me taking off. So if the audio is a little loud, I am at an airport and there are jet engines running at full speed behind me, so please forgive me on that one.
Yeah, this is the new industry standard magnet—this is at the top of the line; you can get it anywhere. It’s the most powerful airport magnet on the market—fastest, easiest clean off, and it’s got the best colors. Look at that, we just guessed and we got the international orange, same color as the Pearson truck. So we got this one, we got the white one, we got the green one. We are going to keep running it at Pearson over the next summer, and they’re going to come back to us and let us know how it did and any benefits it has over the—well, all the benefits it has over the Piranha and just their opinion. That’s why we work with our customers closely to make sure we give them a product that is going to do exactly what they want and solve their issue.
So these guys just brought out some of their debris they picked up from this summer with the Piranha, and they’re going to put it on the ground here and run it over with the Seeker and see how it does for pickup performance. So we got that bunch of debris laid down there, and I’m going to get off to the side a little bit, so once he runs that over, we’ll see how we did. We should get all of it—yeah, that’s all of it, not a speck left behind. So that kind of shows you the holding power of these magnets. It’s that 12×3 assembly just really can hold a ton.
So here it is, Seeker magnetic sweeper finally at the airport, and we just picked up a bunch of debris with it. We already had some on the magnet, they tossed down some of their own to just see what the holding power is like, and like I said, it just holds a ton of metal because it’s got such wide magnets in it—they’re 12×3. So normally we go higher, but this time we went wider for more surface area, and that gives you just a ton of holding power and holding potential because you got more magnet space for the things to sit on so they don’t start piling up.
When maintenance is performed on vehicles, fasteners and other metal debris inevitably gets dropped or lost, resulting in debris on the apron when those vehicles head out to perform normal operations. The Seeker Airmag can be used to collect lost nuts, bolts, washers, or metal cutoffs from the maintenance area before the debris makes its way into the apron.
All right, we’re back out on the tarmac with the Seeker magnetic sweeper. So this is the Seeker Air Mag—this is our sand-colored unit. Like I said, we have three colors available. We have the sand color, as you see here, we have the green one, and we have the International Orange, which we didn’t bring with us. So this is our triple setup, and I showed the brackets in the other video there.
Right now, we’re using this thing basically as an apron sweeper. We’re out in front of the maintenance shop. We already went through the runway and everything with the green one—went through the taxiway and the runway—picked up a lot of items you don’t really want to see falling off planes. Well, not really; most of it was snow bristles, but there were a couple of screws and washers and stuff. Most of them were from around here. I heard them click on as soon as we came by, so as I was riding in the truck there, I could hear them clicking onto the magnet. And because this is obviously the maintenance area, this is where they work on vehicles, so this is where you’re going to get a bunch of debris coming up from working—that’s just how it goes. You start working on stuff, stuff goes missing.
So this thing is the premier Blue Streak Equipment airport FOD control magnet. It’s got the onboard buckets to collect debris. If you really want to, you could use each bucket for a different section—go sweep a section, clean it off, dump that in a bucket, and keep track of where you collect all the debris. That way you can see from which buckets have the most debris in them after you sweep all the different sections of the airport where the biggest debris problem is.
So this thing, like I said, has a 10-1/2 inch pickup height. We’ve got it set at 3 inches. It works great just for cruising around. You can tow it up to—we’ve had it up to 35 km/h, I believe, and it tows perfectly. That triple setup is built really well. It’s got like five points of contact between each magnet, so you don’t have to worry about too much sway. It works nice like that. It does sway a bit at certain speeds, but it’s okay.
You see, this airport’s a working airport, so when you go out on these runways, you need something that’s going to be able to go fast and quick, and that’s what this magnet’s built for. It’s got the big 12-inch by 3-inch magnet in it—lots of surface area to pick up and hold debris and a lot of pickup power thanks to the alternating pole assembly. That means one magnet’s north facing down, one south facing down—that’s just the way it’s charged. It just creates a stronger magnetic field in that little 3-inch area—well, 10-1/2 inch area, really. And there’s a bunch of overlap between the magnets, so in this entire 15-foot sweeping width, there are no sections where you’re going to be losing material just because of where you’re driving. It’s got the full range—15 feet of pickup power—and at the speeds you can tow this thing, that’s lots for clearing big areas quickly.
When you’ve got a giant tarmac place like this, you want to be able to cover the ground quickly, and no one wants to see any metal on the runway. From flat tires to blown jet engines, it’s not a good thing. No one likes it.
Look at that thing—big plane in the background. So yeah, London International Airport’s been very helpful with this thing. They’ve been giving us a lot of design input. We give them an idea, and they tell us if it’s useless or if it’s good—just telling us what features they need, what they’re looking for. And that goes a long way when you actually ask your customers what they want, rather than just trying to guess. That’s big for creating something that’s useful.
So yeah, we’re just sweeping this runway—or sorry, this apron—right outside the maintenance shop. We’ve got all the choppers in the background, there are planes still taking off back there, saw a couple of fighter jets that people are training in.
[Music]
This thing looks right at home where it is. Now, I don’t know which color you’d personally pick. Easy with those big hoops in the back—all you’ve got to do is push those hoops down, it’ll clean everything off the magnet, and then you just roll forward, use the included power stick. You buy one of these, you get a power stick. You buy a triple setup, you get three power sticks. You only really need one for cleanup, but we’ll give you three. You can use them in the shop if you want.
So yeah, deposit all your collected material from the bins or from the power stick into the onboard buckets. It comes with two 5-gallon pails on each one, which is plenty of space for picking up the debris you should be picking up at an airport—unless you’ve got a really dirty airport. But these guys initially came to us, I believe, last winter, and they had some problems with the bristles all over the runway, so we came down, saw what was going on, and we’ve been working with them ever since just to kind of create better solutions for these situations.
Yeah, this is a nice machine. It works well. It’s the top-of-the-line FOD control magnet for any airport—civilian or military. If you want a premier magnetic sweeper that’s going to be stronger than anything else on the market, have more convenient features, easier height adjustment, easier clean-off, better towing—comes with lights, comes with fenders, comes with pintle rings—nice unit. This is the best one on the market.
So this is the first stage of our Seeker FOD management system. There are going to be a few other ones coming out in the near future, but this is the first one because you might as well lead with a magnet—collect all the metal that’s on the ground that you can get—and then do the rest of the FOD control from there, because why waste the extra space on your other FOD management components when you can get the magnet? The magnet gets all the ferrous stuff, and then all the other FOD control pieces can get the…
Having any FOD on a runway is hazardous to all aircraft on the airfield, a single wire bristle from a snow brush can wipe out an engine on any jet powered aircraft. This issue is more prevalent on military aircraft because the intake for the turbine is lower and closer to the surface of the runway, but any FOD can still damage commercial jet engines. Other FOD like nuts, bolts, and other fasteners can damage tires on aircraft which can cause the aircraft to lose control. The Seeker Airmag FOD Magnetic sweeper can quickly cover airfields and has the capability to get out of the way of incoming aircraft since it is stable at high speeds. These videos show the Seeker clearing the runway at London International Airport and a section of Toronto Pearson International Airport’s runways.
Introducing the new Seeker Air Mag FOD control magnetic sweeper. This magnet was developed in partnership with the London International Airport, with association from Pearson Airport. We’ve been running this design by these guys for the last couple of months, and this magnet is specifically built for airports to be able to pick up any kind of FOD or metal debris that might be on the airfield, the apron, or the runway.
So we’re here at the London Airport—you see the big orange paramedic chopper in the background—and we started talking to these guys last year when we were developing some new products. They have been helping us out to get some features and functions that are important to them. This new system is loosely, very loosely, based on our old Piranha magnet. It’s a triple setup we have here, but you can buy these individually. They’re 5 ft sweep individually, and then when you hook all three together, you get a 15 ft sweeping width. That’s a big French plane coming in.
The magnets in this new Seeker Air Mag are twice as strong as the Piranha, so what that lets you do is still be able to pick up lots of metal debris you might find on a runway while still going at a speed that’s appropriate for runway use. When we talked to these airports, they said that when you come on the runway—like we’re doing right now—you’ve got to get up to speed quickly. If you’re on this runway, you need to be on and off quickly because there are planes coming in and out all day and night. So if you’re doing this FOD sweeping, you need to be in and out in a timely manner.
With that in mind, we created this new magnet that’s twice as strong as the Piranha. It actually uses an alternating pole kind of assembly, so there are basically two layers laid out front and back. I believe it’s 12 in total width of the magnet assembly, so it’s two 6 in magnets, or two magnets laid out side by side. One’s charged South on the bottom, and one of them is charged North on the bottom. What that does is they kind of link together and it creates a super strong field that is more effective at picking up debris even while at high speed.
Keeping your airfield clean like this is obviously very important for airport safety, and it gives people peace of mind when you’re at the airport and you see the magnet running around—because they’re like, hey, my plane’s not going to suck in any metal today.
You can hear it as we’re going by these sections here; that’s the terminal. These planes and the baggage trucks and everything are running around here, so that’s right by the terminal. People load up, and when you—you know, the baggage trucks are running around, there’s luggage on the back, zippers might fall off, bolts might fall off the baggage trucks. That’s what would be called the apron. So this thing is also meant for apron cleaning. You wouldn’t necessarily have to use the triple setup, but a single sweeper would work great for apron cleaning as well.
So we’re just cruising along this airfield here. I believe we’re going about, I’d say, 15 miles an hour—25, 30 km an hour—and this thing is perfectly fine doing that. It’s got 16 1/2 in tires on it that are flat-free, so if you do get any punctures, which is pretty unlikely in a situation like this considering your major debris is mostly snow bristles and nothing like a nail or spike or anything that’s going to cause a puncture.
This thing has our lights on it, so that’s a light system just so if you’re at an airport that requires having turn signals and brake lights and that sort of thing, we’ve got that equipped on this one. And we have our safety flag—these flags are safety flags just so that if you’re walking and you’re not looking, you don’t run into the thing. It also really helps with backing it up because they’re such low trailers you can’t really see the edges of them, so when you’re backing up, you look in the rearview mirror, and there are your flags.
Unlike the Piranha series, which has onboard debris bins that you just—you know, flip the magnet tray up and then it dumps in the bin directly—to save space and make a more efficient design, these come equipped with two 5G buckets on the back. That’s to collect all of your debris once you clean the magnet off. You’ll see on this outer one here, there’s a Power Stick Pro Elite—that’s another one of our products mainly aimed at roofing and manufacturing cleanup—but it is the easiest thing to pick up metal debris with, rather than getting a broom and a shovel. That comes right with the magnet.
So when you do a clean-off cycle—which we’ll show you in another video, maybe in this one, not sure yet—but when you do get this thing full of debris and it’s time to clean it off, all you’ve got to do is pull that big lever on the top, that big black lever, pull that down, it drops everything, pull your truck forward, and it’ll leave you a nice pile of metal. Then that’s why the Power Stick is there, so while you’re out you can clean it off. Say we’re stopped right now, we could clean it off, use the Power Stick to put everything in one of the buckets, and then keep going with a strong magnet. If you’ve got a clean magnet, it’s going to be the most power possible because every single piece of debris you collect takes away from the magnetic power, because the magnet has to use some of the power to hold on to the debris.
I think I said before, these magnets are 5 ft sweeping width each, and when you get the triple system, which is what we have here—we sell these individually, and we’ll also sell them as a triple setup like this. Individually, it’s a 5 ft sweeping width, and then we sell a bracket system that links them all together. You’ll see on the corners there there’s a small pencil ring hook on the front of each of these magnets that’s hooked to a larger bracket on the front of the lead magnet, so that’s towing the one behind, towing the one across and behind it. It’s the same on this side—just a pin ring hitch hooked to a bracket on the front of the lead magnet. I don’t think you can see it from here, but in the back, there’s also another stabilizing bracket that holds them all in line as well from the back. Otherwise, those ones in the rear might start swaying or getting a little weird in corners. So it’s stabilized on the front and the back, and there’s an additional latch right in front of the screw jack—it’s behind the bucket in front of the screw jack. There’s an additional latch that holds it, stabilizing it from another point.
These are towable. I don’t know what the top speed we’ve had them up to is, but they’re very stable. We’re doing about 40 now—40 km an hour—and they don’t wobble at all. These things are height adjustable. You probably see the big trailer jack-looking mechanisms on the top of them; those are screw jacks that allow you to adjust the height very precisely, between 1 and 3 in—that’s your maximum and minimum. Because this magnet is so powerful, the maximum pickup height for a 2 1/2 in nail is 10 1/2 in off the ground, so it’ll pick up a nail from 10 1/2 in, but the highest you can set it is 3 in.
Why would we do that? Why wouldn’t we let you crank it up to like 6 in? Well, because we know this is getting used on an airport and, well, that’s what we intended it for anyway. You can use it anywhere, but it’s meant for fast sweeping. If you look at the rest of our magnetic sweepers, a lot of the off-road ones, we recommend going like 2–4 miles an hour. This one, you can go a lot faster with it because it’s a very powerful magnet and it’s very low to the ground. Our off-road ones are normally set higher—like 4 in, 5 in. This one’s set really low and it’s very strong, alternating pole assembly, so that lets you get the most effective pickup while still traveling at the speed you want.
I believe this magnet has a wraparound function on it, so if you are on a potholed surface—which, you know, you shouldn’t be if you’re on a runway—but if you’re using this somewhere else and the magnet happens to hit the ground, it’s a stainless steel debris pan on the bottom, so it can take the hit. If the bottom of the magnet housing, or I guess it would be the debris pan, touches the ground and some of your debris gets hit by the ground, it’s a wraparound function, so it’ll just sit at the back of the magnet because the magnet touches all sides of the debris pan. It’s kind of shaped like an L with kind of a D shape—think of it as a D tipped over forwards, the curved part facing the ground, kind of like that. The magnet touches the back of the pan, so when it does hit the ground, all of the material you’ve collected will just get wiped to the back of the pan and still held on with the magnet. So even running through grass or anything like that, you don’t have to worry about losing debris you’ve collected.
This is part of our new Seeker magnets or Seeker FOD solution—there are going to be a few other ones coming out that will interface with this for a complete cleaning system for any large tarmac areas. This is just the first part of it—this is the magnetic part. You kind of want to lead the charge with the magnet so then the rest of your cleaning solutions can pick up whatever’s left out, because there’s no point in using a nonferrous FOD collection to pick up ferrous material when you can just mount a magnet in front of it and clear up more space.
There’s the terminal for the London International Airport, and we’re cruising by with our new Seeker Air Mag. I’m betting every single person that’s in that terminal who sees us going by is wondering, why is there a guy sitting in the back of the truck on a bucket? But they should know that we are cleaning up their runway so they have a nice safe takeoff and landing. You don’t want a flat tire on a plane and you also don’t want your plane to suck in any metal that might be out here.
Every single one of these magnets has 2,160 cubic in of magnet material in it, so just think of that—that’s a lot of magnetic material to hold on. Like I said, we made this thing wider than it is tall. Generally, when we make the off-road sweepers, we stack the magnets taller because it creates a stronger, a longer field so you can mount things higher and not have to worry about hitting rough terrain. But this is working on smooth terrain; it’s meant for smooth terrain. If we stack them side by side rather than up and down, side by side you have more surface area facing the ground. Like I said, we’ve got that alternating pole assembly—one’s charged South down, one’s charged North down—so that creates a more concentrated field and allows for faster pickup, and having that extra surface area facing the ground gives you more places where the magnet can actually hold on to debris, which means you can hold on to more debris without losing as much power. So you have to clean it off less often, because when you’re out here on this runway, like we just went up and back in the last 10 whatever minutes, we can’t just stop out there and clean it off. I’m like, oh, our magnet’s getting full, let’s stop—no, we’ve got to make it to a place where we can stop. There’s no stopping when you want; you can, you stop when you can out here. That’s why we have the wider magnet assembly, just so it can hang on—there’s more surface area for the metal to grab onto.
All right, so we’re accelerating now to make another pass through the main runway. It looks like we’re going to run through the taxiway a little more. So this magnet is—yeah, it’s built for FOD collection. This thing comes in three different colors—we have the olive here, or olive drab, looks great. This thing is also going to come in a sand color and International Orange. I believe we have the sand one here as well, we’re going to put that on, and then I think we’re going to do the orange one at a different airport.
So, running through the taxiway here, this is just where the planes are staging to go to the runway. We just had to wait for a couple little planes to take off; I don’t know where they’re going, probably not too far because they’re all very small. But yeah, it’s a big open space and this magnet’s built to clean it. When you’ve got size like this—a 15 ft sweeping width—and you can run it 20 mph, no problem, that’s ideal. Because we’ve got this thing, such a powerful magnet, 10 1/2 in pickup height, and that alternating pole assembly with the extra surface area near the bottom of the magnet, you can hold on to and pick up a ton of debris even while you’re, like, driving this fast.
That allows you to cover—like we’ve been out here for 10 minutes, 15, 20 minutes, and we’ve been sitting a lot of it just sitting there—we covered that whole section to the left, taxiway and runway, in 10 minutes easily, all the way up to the other hangars on the other side of the airport. Then we just did one lane on the return trip, we did the other lane. So it’s not hard. This does—I mean this is a wide runway here, but some of the narrow ones it’ll do half the runway in one rip.
So now we’re into the gravel now, like I said, this is meant for smooth tarmac, but it is still a big stainless steel pan on the bottom and it’s set 3 in off the ground. We have a lot of customers who use our Piranhas in landfills, so this is not unheard of taking it on.
How’s that for moving up in the world? We’re now on the runway at Pearson International Airport. They just shut down this runway so we could get out here and get the Seeker out where it belongs—on high-speed, high-intensity, quick magnetic cleaning. We’ve had it run up to 35 km an hour. I don’t know what these guys are going to hit, but it’s pretty stable at high speed, so you can drag it.
When they got the call that we could go out on the runway, they gave us like a five-minute notice and we had to get the hell out of here. At that point, the guy in the truck with the sweepers is just going to hit the gas and get out—doesn’t matter if we’re actually picking anything up or not. There should be bristles out here just from the snow brushes from the winter. They’ve probably run them already, so I bet we will pick something up. I don’t know if we’ll have time to see about the cleaning just because we might need to get out of here and they want to get us on our way.
So this thing is built for exactly this: fast sweeping of huge areas. We’ve got a 15t sweeping width and a 35 km an hour max speed—quote unquote, don’t quote me on that. But these guys can get in, pick up any debris they need, and get out, clean it off nice and easy just by hooking it to a truck. There’s no maintenance involved—you maybe grease the wheel bearings once in a while, but there’s no oil to change, there’s no machines to start, there’s no carburetors to clog up. You just plug it in, hook it up, and it’ll work. You don’t have to plug it in if you don’t want to, but these guys like the lights.
So now we’re going down the south end of the runway here. You see a plane coming in. So we’ve got a jet coming in off the south side of the runway, but they aren’t landing on us—they are landing near us, so we’re clear here to sweep without having to worry about any planes coming up. You see the marks on the asphalt here, there’s that jet in the background. Always seems to be in the shadow no matter what you do to it.
So if you need to clean up large areas quickly, this is the one for you. It’s built for flat spaces, high speed, and high pickup rate with high holding power. This thing holds on to a ton of debris before it starts missing, which is beneficial for this because, like I said, these guys don’t have much time out here. So you gotta run it up, run it down quickly, and then when they say get out, you gotta get out.
You see the terminal in the background there, and we’re going to keep sweeping. It looks like it’s actually picking something up, just doing a couple loops. So looks like we’ve got half the driveway here, and there’s another plane coming in—seems like they do that a lot here. I don’t know why.
So when we get back there, unless they kick us out, I think I’m going to try to see what their initial thoughts are on it. It seems to be performing pretty well. There’s an Air Canada flight coming in right now.
The Seeker Airmag FOD Control Magnetic Sweeper can be purchased as a single Seeker Airmag with 60” inches of sweeping width (5 feet / 1.524 meters) or linked together with two additional sweepers to create the Seeker Airmag 180 triple trailer setup with 180” inches of sweeping width (15 feet / 4.572 meters). This system uses a series of link bars and hitches to make the three sweepers work together.
Even when towing the Seeker in a triple trailer setup, the Seeker was designed to be able to backup if you need to. The triple trailer setup was designed so that all three trailers are connected solidly as one unit, so when connected together they act and feel like one big trailer, allowing you to backup if you get yourself into a tight situation where you can’t go forward and need to backup. There’s lots of tight spaces and a lot of equipment around airports and you never know when you might need to get out of the way or get into a situation where you might need to back up and we’ve thought of that and made the Seeker easy to backup in either a single or triple trailer setup.
The Seeker FOD Magnetic Sweeper triple trailer setup works better than a single wide trailer as the three individual Seeker units are designed to follow the contours in the ground that would cause a single wider sweeper to bottom out. Even though airport grounds appear flat many have sloped surfaces that are designed to drain water from areas. These sloped surfaces can present a problem for wider sweepers when they are set at low sweeping heights. Having three individual narrower Seeker units allows sweeping heights to be set low and still not bottom out or “hang up” on any high points. This means better pickup performance of debris.
The Seeker can also be linked together in single file if needed to fit through access gates.
If you order a single trailer, a connection kit, and additional rear trailers which are available as accessories so you can create a triple setup later if you wish. This video goes over how the brackets link the sweepers together.
the Seeker magnetic sweepers for airports in the sand color, so we have the triple setup here. I’m just going to go over how the brackets work to link all these three together. It doesn’t matter which sweeper you use—these main units are all the same. The difference is the tongues that you bolt on. So if you buy a single sweeper, it’ll just come with this larger tongue on the front; it’s all pintle ring. And then, if you buy the triple setup, it’ll come with this bracket on the rear. So this bracket interfaces with these latch points here that get held in with a pin, and all that does is just tie these rear two sweepers together so that they won’t start swinging as you’re towing the system.
So that covers the rear of the magnets and how it stays stable that way. And then on the front, we’ve got the smaller pintle ring on the front here. So these just bolt on just the same as the other pintle ring hitches, and then that hooks to an arm that comes out with a lead sweeper. So the lead sweeper, like I said, it’s the same as all the other ones here. So that lead sweeper has an additional arm slid into the front frame, and you see there’s a couple different pin locations there for whether you have the triple setup hooked up or not, so you can slide that in and those won’t stick out anymore.
So on this arm that sticks out of the lead sweeper, you’ve got a big bushing that goes through your pintle ring with that pin on top, which is also secured on the bottom with a lynch pin. So that tows your magnet—basically that’s all your towing force controlled.
And here’s a look at the secondary sweeper—this is the second row—so that bracket arm would just fit right in there, and then the pin goes through the top. So these are all interchangeable. So there’s your towing, there’s your rear stability on the back, then on the front is a very similar system—it’s just a little crevice with a latch that goes through it and then a pin. So you’ve got that on either side.
You might be able to see it better on this side. So this is a mirrored image of what the latch looks like, because obviously this one can go on the left or right side—it’s the same either way. And then that latch goes into the crevice, goes underneath the pin, and then it’s secured that way. And then there are these bumpers all the way around on the sweepers anywhere where there could be a pivot point. Those are there to control that.
So that’s how the triple system hooks up. It’s pretty stable, and like I said, these can either be ordered as a single or triple.
The Seeker Airmag FOD Control Magnet uses a manually operated pivoting magnet clean-off system that requires the operator to push down on a solid steel counterweight on the top of the clean-off lever. The counterweight assists in swinging the magnet housing away from the stainless-steel debris pan when performing clean-off. The clean-off lever will also stay in the downward position because the magnet housing will magnetize to the chassis of the trailer in the clean off position.
Included with every trailer is a Powerstik Pro Elite magnetic sweeper to assist with picking up collected debris after the trailers are cleaned off and all the debris is dropped onto the ground. When collecting debris using the Powerstik Pro Elite, all material can be dropped into the onboard buckets, so nothing is left on the ground, preventing more FOD contamination on an airfield or apron. To see a more detailed explanation of how to perform clean-off on the Seeker Airmag check out this video.
So after we ran through the runway there, we just went up the taxiway and the runway in front of the London International Airport here. There were planes taking off, so we had to wait a little bit, but we ran up there, out, down to the other hangar on the other side of the airport and back, and now we’re on this little gravel place, and we’re going to show you how to clean off the Seeker AirMag.
So as I said in the other video while we were driving, these big handles here actually are attached to the magnet inside of the housing. So all it does is just pivot the magnet up and away from the pan on the bottom, which separates the magnet from all the debris you’ve collected. So to clean it off, we’ve got three levers here—you’ve got to pull all three of them, and they actually magnetize to the frame at the top, so you don’t have to worry about holding it up the whole time or holding it down, I guess.
So once all these are pulled down, we’ll get the truck to pull forward and we should have three little piles of whatever we picked up. Now because we’re on gravel, you might think, “Oh, what if you just can’t see it, it’s in the gravel?” We thought of that. We got power sticks.
So the power stick comes with the magnet, so when you do clean it off on the gravel or wherever you’re cleaning it off, you don’t have to worry about spotting every single piece and picking it up. You can just run this power stick on the ground and it’ll collect everything that comes off the magnet and you deposit it into these buckets. So I’ll get the truck to pull forward and then we’ll do that.
We pulled the truck forward here. After releasing the magnets from the debris pan, we’ve got them stuck up against the top of the frame. I removed this power stick before we pulled them away, just so I have it, and after we pulled the magnets and the truck away, we got three clear lines of metal debris that we picked up. This is all very fine material; there’s a couple washers and some screws—one screw—but most of it is just this snow bristle material that’s used to clear snow from the runway. So that’d be done during the winter, and it’s late fall here, so it hasn’t been done since maybe March, and there’s still lots of them out here.
So, we got the power sticks here. There’s a bucket on the back, or two buckets on the back of each sweeper; they just are bungee-corded down, so you just move the bungee cord, pull your bucket, and these are nice, high-quality buckets. There’s no holes in them, so when you put the stuff in here, it should stay in here and there’s even a lid on the top, so as you’re driving it doesn’t bounce out. Now, we know you’ll probably lose these, but you can get them anywhere.
So you get your bucket, you got your power stick. The Power Stick Pro Elite that comes with it will actually hold a very surprising amount of metal, so that’s from one magnet—so one of the three trailers—that’s what it’s picked up. You just swipe it with the power stick that quickly, and then the power stick—there’s just a clean-off sleeve with a button here—drop it all off in the bucket.
So we’ll get the other two piles. Here’s another pile, and with this power stick, you can just drag it right through the gravel because the magnet’s packed on every side of the housing in here, so if you do drag whatever you’ve collected against the ground, it’ll just wrap around the other side of the magnet. So there’s two, and the third one is right here, so just one swipe like that, flip it over, give her another one for good measure because we are at an airport, and we don’t want this stuff out here.
And there’s a straggler, and there you go—the magnet’s cleaned off, got our power stick to clean everything, put it back in the bucket. Close your bucket up, put everything back on the trailer.
So this just gets bungee-corded back down, there’s a little slot to hook into the bungee cord, and then this goes back in the rubber latches that are built into the trailer. So once you wrestle your Power Stick Pro Elite back in there, you get your top end, put that one back in—it’s easiest to spread them apart and then drop the magnet in there like that—close your latches up. It’s probably good that it’s a firm fit just because, you know, you don’t want these things flying off as you’re driving, too. And then when you’re ready to sweep again, pop these back up.
Now, these at the top—this is a 2-and-1/2-inch, yeah, 2-and-1/2-inch solid piece of steel, so you might think, why do you need a 2-and-1/2-inch solid piece of steel for a lever? Well, that’s to counterweight the magnet so you don’t have to pull as hard to go down. So this weight of the solid piece of steel on this lever against this magnet makes it like a 40-pound pull to clean it off. So you see, just one hand, you can just go like this and drop it down. It is a little heavy, but if you didn’t have this extra steel here, it’d be even harder.
So that’s the entire clean-off procedure for the new Seeker AirMag.
A: Counterweight for easy magnet clean off
B: Buckets to contain collected FOD
C: Rear brace keeps side sweepers inline and allows for mounting accessories
D: 6’ foot safety flags for better visibility
E: Foam filled tires
F: Stainless steel debris pan
The Seeker Airmag has an alternating pole permanently charged C8 ceramic magnet assembly that is 12”D x 3”H x 60”W inches. The alternating pole assembly boosts power in the operating range of 1-3” inches and works effectively to pick up metal debris even at speed. The magnet assembly can pick up a 2.5” inch 8 penny nail from 10.5” inches off the floor.
This is a Seeker maximum pickup height video. We’ve got the sweeper suspended on wooden blocks. We’ve got it set up at 10 and a 2 inch off of the ground. We’ve got a 2 and 1/2 inch nail. We’ll go ahead and slide it under there. You can see it picked it up with ease at 10 and 1/2 inches.
A: Powerstik Pro Elite on all sweepers for more effective and ergonomic debris cleanup
B: Rear 2.5” inch pin for towing accessories
C: Powerful 12” inch x 3” inch C8 ceramic magnet with horseshoe configuration
D: Hand cranks for easy sweeping height adjustment
E: Rear debris flange ensures debris collection at higher speeds
“Gauss” is a measure of the magnetic field strength. The strength or power of the Seeker’s magnetic field in the 1-to-3” inch operating range is shown in the following picture. This magnet provides all the power required to pick metal debris off runways and aprons while at speeds. Setting the magnetic sweeping height lower will always produce better sweeping results allowing for faster travel while collecting more debris. This gauss chart shows the power levels at each distance from the magnet.
We can’t emphasize enough – what matters is the Gauss field strength measurement at the distance the magnet is from the ground where the debris is. For Example, If you’re always going to be sweeping with a sweeping height of 2” inches, then you should be looking at the Gauss measurements of your various magnetic sweeper options at this 2” inch distance. If someone ever gives you a Gauss field strength measurement, your first question should be “From what distance was the measurement taken?
A: A= Distance from Magnet (Sweeping Height)
Note: Gauss (G) shown as the peak gauss measured in the center of the magnet at each distance.
A: Magnetic trailer lights with included magnet clips for cable management
B: Side braces with safety chains act with rear link tube to keep sweepers connected
To determine the pickup power of the Seeker Airmag FOD Control Magnetic Sweeper during development, Bluestreak Equipment performed pickup tests using various debris types at different towing speeds in a controlled testing environment. This testing procedure has been used to test a few sweepers including the Piranha and Mammoth, this helps to demonstrate the difference in magnetic power between the sweepers. It also shows the max speeds that the magnets can be operated at while still achieving 100% pickup rate for various types of metal debris. To see the full test procedure and results Click Here.
On delivery of the completed Seeker Airmag to Toronto Pearson after getting input on the design over the last year, the entire maintenance crew wanted to see the basics of how to operate and clean off the magnetic sweeper after they swept near the gates of the airport. In the video the debris collected from the apron is deposited into the Seeker Airmag’s onboard buckets. And the maintenance crew got a chance to see the power difference between the Piranha magnetic sweeper they already have and the new twice as powerful Seeker Airmag.
I pick that up pretty quick. We’re like, oh my god, did it get all—all right, so we are going to do a clean-off video of the Seeker here. So we got our whole crew and everyone’s going to see what we picked up. It’s fine, you can be on camera. Yeah, so to clean it off, all you got to do is just pull these up and then they stay down. That drops everything. Yep, so that swings the magnet up away from the debris pan. So you pull this magnet—the handle down pulls the handle up off of the plate at the bottom—all the debris will be separated further from the magnet, and if you pull forward six feet, everything will be left here and we can sweep it up with these little magnets and put it in the buckets, unless you get it to like 600°F.
Now you can just pop the magnets back down. Oh, look at that, you got the lock and the key. Yeah, exactly, fantastic things. There you go guys. I guess that key doesn’t work anyways, you got a bucket open, would—
So once you get this in here, you pick it all up, and then you come over to these buckets and you drop it off—drop it off without touching anything. That way you don’t have to touch it, ‘cause that shit’s sharp. Well, this is the magnet, not that. Yep, the magnet, it’s in the aluminum tube here.
Someone made an observation: isn’t it best to bring the, uh, the bucket to the—yeah, yeah. I never said—I see, I don’t have an engineering degree, okay? I am here for my looks. Hey Hunter, you better drive this all day. I didn’t, for—I—yeah, we need another bucket.
So they just said, isn’t it better to bring the bucket to the debris instead of the debris to the bucket? There you go. All right, now we got—now that we got the thinkers here.
So, you’d be surprised how much this thing actually holds. It’s rare earth magnets, so you get three of these with it, ‘cause obviously they’re going to go missing. Someone’s going to take one to a shop or something, so we give you three with it. But this is a lot easier than bending over and picking up with your hands, right? And then this plastic sleeve on here—‘cause you’re driving it on the concrete, right? So you’re dragging this on the concrete; if it wears out, you can flip it four times, so you got four wear surfaces.
Yeah, I mean, then you also don’t have to be able to see everything. So if, like, you’re on gravel or something, it’ll still pick it up and hold it. So once you got it cleaned off, just chuck it back in the blocks here. There you go. So once you wrestle those back on, throw the buckets back in, you’re good.
The bar’s down. Pull it forward. Yeah, the magnet’s on like a pivot in there, so it’s touching a stainless steel debris pan, and then all the stuff gets stuck to the debris pan. So when you swing the magnet up, it drops, and there you go—the entire clean-off cycle in front of the crew.
We got a bunch of guys here, picked up a ton of debris, so I think now we’re going to hit the runway. And hopefully we don’t get anything out there, but we likely will. So we threw some stuff down to just test it, to see how much it would pick up. That was their whole box of test media that they use, and it got it all in the first try, ‘cause it’s twice as strong as a Piranha. So we cleaned it all off, showed the guys how to use it, and now I think we’re going to hit the runway. And yeah, that’ll be—
On delivery of the completed Seeker Airmag to Toronto Pearson after getting input on the design over the last year, the entire maintenance crew wanted to see the basics of how to operate and clean After running the Seeker Airmag around the runways and aprons at the Toronto Pearson Airport we asked the crew chief for his initial impressions of the Seeker Airmag. From just one afternoon of use, the crew chief was looking forward to sending out his crew to regularly sweep around the airport aprons and runways.off the magnetic sweeper after they swept near the gates of the airport. In the video the debris collected from the apron is deposited into the Seeker Airmag’s onboard buckets. And the maintenance crew got a chance to see the power difference between the Piranha magnetic sweeper they already have and the new twice as powerful Seeker Airmag.
Just tell me what’s your honest opinion on how it’s worked so far.
Well, like I was saying, we have the single unit one. Yeah, I guess it’s a lot less powerful than this one, right? Half as powerful. It worked great all summer—it was very pleasant. A lot of the fire bristles that we have to maintain, our winter maintenance, sweeping, it worked very well. And trouble calls, we have, you know, a spill, a bolt, or all that that happens from the maintenance crews, we were able to deploy that network well. This is twice as powerful—really good job. The nice thing is it holds more, you know, the…
The cleaning is very… yeah, that other one is kind of like, two flips and then you got to brush it off, right? This is a little easier. Power sticks make it easy to turn, very well, yeah, on the tight spots we have. And sitting beside, I was pleased with the turning radius, because in theory, you can spread them out a little more, but then you’re missing wherever the tire…
Was it 15 to 15 ft? Fifteen to fifteen feet? Okay, you might have like an inch gap, but not really, because the magnet kind of comes out and around. The demonstration that we saw there was great as well. That’s definitely a product I’d like to see in our maintenance program—something like that.
Yeah, I think we’re leaving this here. Well, you got one? Yeah, well here you go—new, to use it and give you guys a good review. This time not on camera. No, just let us know how it works. I don’t care if you like it or not.
Oh, I like it. I, you know, I was looking to get something, you know, actually, we’re looking to get away—they were loading the back. See, you got zipper spots, everything, F, around. Dude’s got to 180 turn around sometimes; he blows all down, bre. Yeah, coming out, you got locks, got zippers, a lot of… I wouldn’t want to stand behind a jet and shoot a…
The Seeker Airmag includes a set of trailer lights with a 4-pin connector system. The lights use magnets to attach onto the chassis of the trailer with smaller magnets to keep the wiring in its proper place along the trailer chassis on the way to the truck. 6-foot-high Safety flags are included with the trailer to increase visibility and make reversing the trailer easier.
The Seeker Airmag FOD Control Magnetic Sweeper in the triple sweeper configuration overlaps each trailer so there are no gaps in the magnet coverage for the full 15’ foot, 180” inch or 4.572 meters of sweeping width.
Adjusting the sweeping height on the Seeker Airmag is extremely easy and is accomplished using crank handles on both sides of each sweeper and sweeping height can be set between one and three inches. There is a scale laser cut into the side of the height adjustment assembly that indicates the sweeping height you have the sweeper set at. This aids the user in setting a consistent height on each side of the trailer and among all trailers. When cleaning a large very flat surface the sweeping height should be set as low as possible for better debris pickup, however if there are bumps or other obstructions present on the surface you are working on, the sweeper needs to be set higher to avoid ground strikes.
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