Nail picker upper

Mike Olson

Member
Messages
41
Location
Western, NY
I finished tearing down my old shed and had a bunch of nails to pickup out of the grass. after maybe 10 minutes picking nails out of the grass i said heck with that and headed to the garage.

Spent maybe 15 minutes on this. Most of that time was spent finding small enough screws. I had a wad of old hard drive magnets that I screwed to the bottom of a 2x4 that was part of the shed and attached a piece of lath that i found somewhere.

It was amazing, though it was a pain picking the nails off after but at least i didn't have to bend over anymore. I have knee and back issues...

Used my Son's little hand saw to cut the angle and chiseled it out at an angle.
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Screwed all the HDD magnets to the othersize with small screws.
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Sitting on the garage floor to see if the handle angle is good and i think so.
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First swipe through the grass.
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I have those little hardrive magnets nailed all over my shop to hold tools and other metallic objects.
(I even put my radio remote on a metal keychain and just slap it on a hardrive magnet so I can always find it easy)
Great idea for nail sweep.
Put it on a closet pole with 2 wheels attached and it would be great for a driveway.
 
Put a strip of plastic like a garbage bag on it a couple of small washers on the magnets will hold it & then just get it over the bench & strip the plastic & nails off all at the same time. Pick out the washers & stick the plastic back on again & your ready to go.
 
My nail pick-er-uper is Brent's dad when he makes it out here :rofl::rofl::rofl:

In my old days as a laborer at Ft. Irwin (Calif.), they let me drive the "magnet truck" (when I wasn't driving the back hoe). As long as the generator was running, I'd be able to pick up all of the metal along the roads. Kept having to look out of the rear view mirror to make sure I didn't leave a ton of metal here and there and have to back up to re-collect it :thumb::thumb:
 
i used to have a magnet from an old Novel server hard drive. The drive was about the size of a large shoe box stood on end. the two magnets were so strong and each were about the size and shape of a bent pack of cards. I stuck one to the I-beam in my basement and it shattered into thousands of magnetic shards that stuck like glue. There was also this big blue flash almost like an arc when that happened. :dunno:

Not sure what happened to the other one.
 
We've got a weird little zig zag fence going up and down our drive. I'm pretty sure one of the previous owners came up with all kinds of projects to keep their kids busy. One of those projects was nailing the logs together. Unfortunately the logs keep coming apart and I keep finding nails all up and down the driveway.

I did get one of those rolling sweeps to pick up the stuff and it does an ok job. If only it had the rare earth magnets like those hard drive magnets!

Looks great!
 
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