I have been a mechanic all of my adult life. Magnets of varying sizes have always been in my toolbox. The problem with having a strong magnet close to your tools is that it tends to magnetize the metal parts of the tool. That’s nice for a screw driver, after a while as the screw will adhere to the end preventing dropping the screw. The downfall of that is your screwdriver begins to pick up every bit of metallic particle in your toolbox drawer or other small parts as you move it into position to use. My point is, wouldn’t your metal parts on your gun tend to magnetize over time and be prone to pick up metallic pieces causing issues with performance and reliability? I don’t want to be picking off splinters of metal off of my hands after picking up my gun or worse yet, pull the trigger and get no boom because of a stray piece of metal lodged somewhere in my trigger assembly. Any exsperience with this out there?
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I was actually kicking this idea around with my Boss the other week as we were destroying a pile of hard drives and removing the magnets. They are hella strong earth magnets. Conventionally, we stick them on the bottom of the oil and transmission pans of the fleet vehicles and our personal rides to keep the metal bits out of the rotating assemblies.
That said I’m not sure if it would magnetize a gun but it stands to reason that it would if you left it there long enough. I’d have to look it up again but I’m pretty sure a degaussing device is pretty easy to make.
For giggles I just stuck my 1911 to a computer magnet on top of my safe. It held it up with only about 2 1/2" of barrel/slide on the magnet.
Cheers,
Craig6
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