Rare Earth Magnets
You can buy these on line but you either have to get the ones with a hole in the middle or glue them in place. Old computer hard drives are a great source of rare earth magnets that have all sorts of uses around the workshop and are particularly usful because they are on a plate that has holes in. When you take apart the hard drive you will need to remove the disk and you will see that it was sandwiched on one side by a pair of magnets that look like this:


Do not get them near your pacemaker, watch or mobile phone or near each other with your fingers in the way
They do not take prisoners and believe me you are not strong enough to hold them apart in close proximity. When joined together you can slide them sideways to separate them. Grind off any protrusions but don’t try to get them off of the backing plate as you will destroy the coating on the magnet. The most obvious use is on the end of a stick for picking up just about anything steel or iron from the floor including set screws lost in the shavings.


Yes that is a Stanley 4.5 plane it has picked up.
Another use I have for these magnets is to hold up two roller blinds that I rescued from an office being refurbished. I use the roller blinds to stop chips flying all around the workshop when I am roughing down on the lathe. One of the blinds is fixed by magnets on a battten to the bottom of my ceiling mounted air filter and the other at right angles on two brackets. This makes them very easy to remove.


What’s that I hear you say. Why is that hose on a bungy cord? Simple it is an easy way to keep both the dust hose and power cable free from obstructions when using hand held machines like sanders and planers. Keeping the cable taped to the hose keeps everything out of mischief.
