Thread: Looking for ideas

A couple of years back I found two large (370 x 120 x 25 mm) permanent magnets in one of our work cleanup skips. The magnets came from a large Titanium sublimation pump and are sheathed in 0.8 mm SS but they still stick together like crazy - in fact they are capable of serious damage if not kept separated. Currently one sits under my DP and acts as a sort of black hole for metal swarf. Every now and then I pick it up and wipe of all the swarf into a plastic bucket. The other sits under a workbench gathering metal dust.

I was thinking one would make an excellent magnetic fence for a woodworking bandsaw. They stick pretty well to the cast iron table of my bandsaw but not quite enough to inspire confidence that they would not move under pressure from a large piece of wood passing thru the saw. I'm pretty sure that if I removed the SS sheathing from a long edge it would really stick to the table and then I would use some cams on the ends to act as lifters so it could be moved.

What I would like to do is find some way of encasing the magnet into a suitable fence. The commercial varieties of these fences use an ally extrusion that covers the full length of the table and also has some embedded T-tracks for hold downs etc. I am not fussed about having T-tracks.

One possibility is to just use MDF to encase the back, top and ends, and use some 1/4" ally plate for the front.

Anyone have any other ideas?