Defiant Magnetic Sweeper

So this stamping facility builds parts for a lot of major automotive manufacturers here in Ontario.

And this parking lot is—obviously, they have a big scrap metal conveyor belt up there—so this parking lot’s being driven in by not only just trucks delivering to the site but also all the employees here.

And obviously, having this much scrap metal near where you’re driving every day is going to lead to some flat tires.

So these guys actually have a magnetic sweeper from us already, but they’re kind enough to let us test out this new one here—this Defiant.

So you can see that thing is collecting a ton of metal right there.

It’s kind of acting like a broom at the moment, just sweeping along with it.

I think we’ll get them—and that’s after one pass through this stuff—so we’ll get them to pull up here and use the included clean-off sleeve to get rid of all that debris.

So the Defiant magnetic sweeper—you see we just installed it in about two minutes; it’s got the four quad magnet pods on each corner, and those things give you about 200 pounds of holding force against the bottom of the forklift to hold this magnet up.

So this kind of strength is getting proven right here as we’re really dragging the ground with a lot of steel, and it’s not being knocked off at all, so we’re not losing the magnet; it’s not falling under the tires yet.

But we’ll get them to pull up and clean this thing out.

So all you got to do to clean it off is flip this bat wing sideways so the sleeve will move out, and then it should just pull right off, but we have a lot of stuff stuck on it, so it’s a little more difficult to pull off.

So this rare earth magnet really holds on everything.

But you can see that’s from one pass around with a very small magnet holding that much steel.

So the Defiant obviously hangs really low on the bottom of a forklift. It hangs—we have it set at two inches, which is about the maximum sweeping height we recommend, and we had that big pile of steel over there collected on the bottom of it.

But what comes with that is, once it gets that trail behind it, gets too long, it might start missing some stuff.

So at that point, when you’re starting missing metal because it’s falling off the back and you’ve got such a long tail dragging behind it, you’re probably going to want to clean the magnet off before then.

So this is an example of a really heavily contaminated area with steel.

But I mean, if you’re working in conditions like this, you’re going to need to clean that magnet off more often than you think.

Now, if you saw in the clip of me cleaning the magnet off, it was pretty difficult to actually pull the sleeve because there was so much friction between the sleeve and the metal pressing into the magnet.

So we have a feature to help with this. Once he turns around here, you’ll see on this side of the magnet, by the GoPro down there, there’s a little T-handle.

So what that handle’s for is for when you have this thing really loaded up with steel and it’s hard to pull off, you can get someone on the other side to stabilize the magnet for you so you can pull on the release lever—well, release handle—without the magnet coming off the forklift or having to manipulate two parts with one hand.

We are back at WISE Line Tools here.

They’ve let us use their forklift before to test the Vigilant, and last time we didn’t have these strings tucked up properly, so the strings got caught on that back wheel and it knocked the Vigilant off and ran it over and made quite a nice little jump for us.

So today, we’ve made sure to tuck up those strings so Dan here can drive around and not have to worry about accidentally running the magnet over.

So this is—they do tool repair here, tool sales, and they also do, like, metal roof forming and stamping.

So we’re in the back by their garbage bins, and they have a little hopper set up here on the left to—looks like—collect scrap metal.

So if we take a trip over here, there should be some metal on the ground, and last time we heard Dan say they do a good job of cleaning up this place, which they do—last time we barely collected anything.

But we’ll see what we got today. Looks like they’ve been stamping a bit more than last time when we were here, so there’ll probably be some slugs or something on the ground.

And there’s always something around garbage bins and pallets.

So if you have this rare earth magnet on the bottom of your forklift, you’re probably not going to be running around like this the whole time while you’re sweeping.

But what it’s going to do for you is, as you’re running your forklift around regularly, it’s going to be constantly cleaning up metal so you don’t have to run into these problems where there’s a large contamination of metal anywhere.

The Defiant is mostly made for just constant maintenance of facilities.

You’re not going to try to clear large areas with it, but just passive cleaning as you’re working gets two jobs done at once. You can collect any metal, prevent—prevent, you know, excessive tire changes which cause downtime and cost money, and it’s just a fairly inexpensive option to double the utility of any forklift on your site. So these attach in just under five minutes; it takes a small amount of setup. You sometimes have to measure something, and then it’s a matter of just moving some ropes around and slapping the thing up there, and it’ll stick. Now, obviously, I installed this one slightly incorrectly off the bat. You got to make sure that Magnepod is sitting on a flat surface for it to hold properly.

And another thing to consider when installing this is you want your ropes—the paracord that connects the magnet pods to the Defiant—to be vertical, straight up and down.

So that’s where most of your magnet holding force is on the pods—straight up and down.

And if you got them on an angle, you’re going to be losing some power. So we’ll get Dan to pull up over here to see if we actually collected anything.

Okay, yeah, there’s something dragging there.

So we showed this already at the other facility, but for the clean-off function, all you got to do is turn this little bat wing thing on the front and then pull the sleeve off. So it looks like we got more than last time we were here.

That could be because it’s a stronger magnet, but I think you guys have also been stamping more than last time when we were here.

So that just looks like, I don’t know, old staples, some piece of—some off cut.

Why don’t we ever bring power sticks to clean this stuff up? So Dan has to take a trip back to the shop here to unload a truck, and he was saying that we might have to take the magnet off to clear the loading ramp he’s got over here, but the whole point of this magnet is you can leave it on all the time.

And we have it set fairly high up, so we’re just walking over—we’re going to take a look at the magnet going over the truck, kind of observe from afar so we don’t get in the way. But if we hear a big crunch noise, we’ll know that the thing doesn’t have enough ground clearance.

So he’s pulling over a steel loading ramp with our rare earth magnet, and the rare earth on the Defiant is more powerful than on the Vigilant, but its pulling force isn’t as strong as the four Magnetpods combined, which give you about 200 pounds of holding force.

So that rare earth magnet on the bottom is not able to overcome that from that distance.

So it looks like there’s no problem getting onto a truck or loading ramp with this magnet mounted, and this is a fairly low forklift.