Sunda Magnetic Sweeper

Processing plants of all kinds that are, you know, processing rock into either an ore or a cement in this case, or just combining materials to make cement—what do they call clinkers—they oftentimes use ball mills to crush up the rock. That works very well; it’s been working for over 100 years. But what happens with this is you have to manage picking up these balls, which works fine when you’re scooping out of a bucket or just unloading from a trailer. But in this case, it’s pretty exaggerated how many are on the ground here. When you’re trying to pick up the last little bit off the concrete, that’s where a magnet comes in.

So these mills have to clean out—or these plants have to clean out—their ball mills once a year, generally, and when that happens, a lot of these balls get spilled on the ground. So that’s the case where this Sunda magnetic sweeper is going to come in handy. This thing is a 12×12-in. magnetic sweeper that’s 49 in. wide. The reason it’s a 49-in. sweeping width is so it can work on most skid steers, and in this case, we have it on a Bobcat S570. That brings the product weight up to about 1,900-and-some-odd pounds—I think it’s 1,920, which means even when you drop it like that, it’s still pretty stable and it’s not going to tip the Bobcat.

Alright, the Sunda magnetic sweeper. So this thing is built for picking up steel balls on processing sites. This place is a cement production facility, so they use these balls to go inside their ball mill to crush up rock and lime and whatever else the ingredients are for concrete and make that into what’s called clinkers. So the Sunda is specifically built to clean up these kinds of balls, and we have an exaggerated amount on the ground right now. But if you look under that skid steer, it’s clean so far, so that’s almost acting like a magnetic bucket, just to push the pile. It didn’t keep them all on the bottom of the magnet, but it brought them all with it.

There’s your cleanup. It’s pretty violent.

So the Sunda magnet, like I said, was built to clean up these balls that were used at ball mills for processing all kinds of ores and rocks and that sort of thing. This only usually becomes a problem at these places once a year when they do the cleanout, but this place just got a new shipment of balls in and they let us run the Sunda around and see what the performance is like at picking up these balls. So these are fresh 20 mm balls, and yeah, we have a giant pile there—a bucket full, I believe—and it pushes them all kind of like a bucket. So even if you’re not able to get close to the ground, not able to, you know, run your bucket across the ground, this is going to work fine for you just to move them and get them out of the way.

Okay, so there is the Sunda, and it’s, like I said, a 12×12 magnet assembly, kind of like the Mammoth, but it’s a little bit different design, and instead of moving the magnet up like we do in the Mammoth, this one has a pan that moves down. So that’s a big thick stainless steel pan on the bottom of there, which allows magnetism to go through but captures the balls before they actually touch the magnet for easy clean off. So this thing is a 1,900-lb unit with a giant hydraulic ram on one side that just runs off your auxiliary ports on the skid steer. All that one hydraulic ram does is push against a giant lever that’s on the pans—or on either side of the pan there’s a giant lever—but it just pushes on the one side with the ram, and that causes all your debris that’s stuck to the debris pan to be separated from the magnetic field so you can drop it on the ground without having to overcomplicate anything.

So I think this magnet has a 15-in. maximum pickup height, using a nail. If you’re not going to use this thing regularly—like I said, you only really use these once a year on a ball milling site unless you have a spill or something like that—but even if you’re not using it for picking up the steel balls, it’s going to be excellent for picking up any kind of debris you may have in your yard after construction or whatever else, because it’ll pick up a nail from 15 in. So you can get any kind of debris at any speed with a skid steer and run it high enough off the ground that you don’t have to worry about hitting anything.

So there’s a shot of the clean off again. He’s got that giant collection of balls on the bottom, and then all he’s got to do is just hit the auxiliary switch and it pops that pan open like a gunshot, cleans them all off. So there’s your pile of how much you can collect with the Sunda in one pass. Yeah, even if you’re not using it for the balls, it’s going to be a great just general debris cleaning unit just because of the massive size of the magnet. Like I said, this is only a 49-in. sweeping width—or 48. The reason we did that is because it’s a 12×12 magnet, and if we were to make it as wide as, like, our Meerkat or something else like that—68 in. wide—then it would be too heavy for most skid steers. So we built this to work on a lot of skid steers. It’s not going to work on your smallest options, but this is a fairly common one, the S570 from Bobcat, and it seems to have no problem despite the 1,900-lb weight of the sweeper.

So if you look at the front of the magnet there, you’ll see there’s a big rubber guard with some little teeth sticking out. What that is, is our debris digging rake system. What that’s going to do for you is if anything is stuck in the ground—underground, like has been packed in or something like that—then you can deploy those and kick them up out of the ground. You see this thing makes light work of picking up these balls. I mean, if you had to pick these up with a bucket, you’d be here with a broom and a shovel. You know, that’s not a fun job. So this thing, you just run them over with the skid steer—probably got heat and air conditioning in that thing if you’re lucky—and that makes the unpleasant job of getting that last 10% of these balls off the ground a pretty easy one.

So as you can see, another shot of the pan there, it swings all the way up and that’s what separates your debris from the magnet, and that makes it really easy—just drop off in some kind of a ball bunker, or they’ve just got them pushed up against the wall here for easy pickup of the bucket.

So see, it picks up that small amount, no problem, off the ground. We were speaking to the operator here and he just said exactly what I said. He said they use the bucket for 90% of moving these things because they get dumped in a pile, like I showed you in the corner. But the bucket can only get, he says, 90%, and then after that it’s a shovel and broom job. I’d rather be sitting in a skid steer than operating a shovel, so that’s where the Sunda comes in, because this ground isn’t perfectly smooth. You can’t just run a blade off like it’s a grader, so if you got something that’ll pull stuff up and out of the ground, up and out of cracks, and whatever is—you know, it’s uneven ground surface to working site, it’s not a mall—so if you’ve got something that can pick up these balls out of that, then you know it’s going to make a lot easier, make a couple guys’ jobs a lot easier. Rather than three dudes sweeping up 1,000 lbs of steel and putting it in a bucket, you’ve got one guy who just dumps it and picks it up off the ground and dumps it somewhere it can get scooped up easily.

Yeah, the Sunda is not your general-use skid steer magnet. I mean, if you want the best power available on the market until we make something bigger, then this is your option. This is the big one. Now, this isn’t what I’m going to recommend for your average construction guys, just in case, unless you need to pick up cannonballs out of some dirt, but it’s meant for a specific task. It’s meant to pick up these balls—it’s built for this—but as a side effect, it’s going to be a great magnetic sweeper just for general use. If these guys don’t need it every day like they say they don’t—they say they only use it once, twice a year—I mean, it’s still a great sweeper just to pick up nails or whatever else is out here. They’d probably be shocked by what’s in the ground just from—you know, there’s construction going on all the time.

As I mentioned earlier in the videos here, this thing has our debris digging rakes on the front of it. This comes standard with the Sunda. So what these are for is exactly what we’re doing with it. If you’ve got some softer ground you want just smoothed out, take any breaking bumps or rain ridges or anything like that out of it, any ruts, you got these. They work doubly as just kind of like spring teeth to groom—well, they are spring teeth—so they work to groom the ground, and what it also does for you is it picks up or it kicks up, rather, any metal debris that might be stuck underneath. Now, these guys said they don’t really have a problem with debris; they don’t get flat tires, but that’s mostly because everything out here has either giant solid tires or it’s that loader in the background, so it’s not going to get a flat from just nails. But this is just part of the function of this magnet. It’s another feature you get: the spring teeth on the front of it. You can ram those things right in the ground, and you’ve got the stone guards in the front to protect anything that’s nearby from getting hit by a rock that gets flung up. I believe these are 3/8-in. spring teeth on here, so lots of power to push the ground. You can really dig them in and they leave a nice smooth surface like that. This place is already pretty smooth; you can see you hit in the ground there a couple times.

So while he’s doing this, there’s another feature of the magnet that’s kind of getting used. As he’s sweeping here, he can’t see exactly what’s underneath the magnet, so when he hits a high spot—like right going up that hill—that magnet’s going to bottom out. You can see those smooth patches there in the frame; that’s where the magnet’s bottoming out. Now, that’s not a problem with the Sunda. You’re not going to lose any of the debris you collected, like the nails you got aren’t going to fly off when you hit the back, because the way the debris pan is designed, it touches the back of the magnet housing. So that giant 12×12 magnet block that’s in there is actually touching the back of the stainless steel debris pan. So if anything does hit the ground and get wiped to the back, it’ll just stick on the back of the debris pan. This is what’s called our wraparound function.

As I was talking about before with the wraparound function, you’ll see he’s only really getting just a bit of slag from the sand there, but let’s see if I’ve got some light—can’t tell if everything’s dusty. But anyways, all the slag that’s been collected after it gets knocked off the main pan from hitting the ground, like you did a couple times, it just sticks on the back of the debris pan, which is a wraparound function that’s on pretty much every magnet.