BEST CHOICE MAGNETS 24 Pack Neodymium Bar Magnets — Worth It?
A 24-pack of neodymium bar magnets for the person who wants to stop fishing with someone else's rig and start building their own. At $24.99 it's basically a playground for experimenting with magnet configurations.
This isn't a fishing magnet. I want to be upfront about that. It's a 24-pack of neodymium bar magnets — which means if you're hoping to drop this in a river and pull up a bike, you're going to have a bad time.
But if you're the kind of person who's ever looked at a commercial fishing magnet and thought 'I could build something better' — this is your starting point. Twenty-four magnets, under $25, and a weekend of figuring out how neodymium actually works when you stack it, angle it, or tape it to things.
I picked this up when I was messing around with a double-sided rig idea I'd been turning over in my head for a while. Didn't work the way I planned. Learned a lot. That's kind of the whole deal with this pack.
So here's the thing about neodymium bar magnets — they're kind of deceptively strong for how small they are, and stacking them does not behave the way your brain tells you it should. I found this out on my kitchen table before I found it out at the water, which I'd call a win.
I was messing around with a concept I'd seen someone post in a forum — basically a linear array of bar magnets mounted along a steel plate to get a wider field footprint instead of the concentrated single-point pull you get from a standard pot magnet. The idea being you'd get more surface area dragging along a silty bottom. In theory. The BEST CHOICE pack gave me enough magnets to actually prototype this without cannibalizing the magnets I actually fish with.
It didn't fully work. But I learned a lot about why.
What I will say is the magnets themselves are legitimately strong for their size — I was surprised. Stack a few of these together and they will absolutely pinch skin if you're not paying attention, which I was not, once, and that was enough. The coating seems decent. Nothing flaked, nothing cracked after a fair amount of handling, stacking, separating, and the occasional one flying across the table because I got the orientation wrong.
Separating them is the part nobody warns you about. Bar magnets in a stack — especially neodymium — are genuinely annoying to pull apart. I ended up keeping a butter knife nearby just to slide them apart edge-to-edge. If you've never worked with strong rare earth magnets before, that's not a knock on this pack specifically, just something to be aware of before you dump all 24 out onto a metal surface simultaneously. (Don't do that.)
At $24.99 for the whole pack, you're basically paying a little over a dollar per magnet. For neodymium, that's actually not bad. I've seen single bar magnets of similar size going for more than that in hobby shops. The value is real, but only if you actually have a project in mind — buying this hoping it'll somehow turn into a usable fishing setup without significant additional work is going to leave you frustrated.
This is a tinkerer's purchase. Full stop.
If you're newer to magnet fishing and you're still getting comfortable with how pull force, rope knots, and bottom conditions interact — just buy an actual fishing magnet and go use it. You'll learn more from an afternoon on a bridge than from any amount of kitchen table experimentation. But if you've been doing this a while and you've got half-formed rig ideas rattling around your head, this pack is a cheap way to start answering some of those questions. Even when the answers are 'no, that doesn't work like I thought.'
I still have about 16 of these sitting in a tackle box. I'll probably do something with them eventually. Or they'll just be there, slowly attracting every loose screw in a three-foot radius.
