FINDMAG 150 LBS Fishing Magnet — Worth Eight Bucks?

I want to be upfront about what this magnet is and isn't. It's not going to replace anything in my bag. But I handed one to my nephew last summer — he'd seen magnet fishing on YouTube and wouldn't stop asking about it — and we took it out to a drainage canal behind a park near his house. Tied it to some paracord I had in my truck. Within twenty minutes he'd pulled up two bolts, a section of rebar, and what I'm pretty confident was part of a shopping cart that had been down there long enough to be almost unrecognizable.

He was completely hooked. Cost me eight dollars.

The magnet itself is small — 36mm is not big. You can basically palm it. The coating felt fine, no obvious defects, the eyebolt threaded in clean and didn't feel like it was going to strip out immediately. I've seen cheaper eyebolts on more expensive magnets, so no complaints there. The pull force is listed at 150 lbs, which — and I say this about every magnet — is a lab number, not a real-world number. You're getting maybe 60-80 lbs of actual usable pull on a flat surface, less on a curved or rusty piece of metal sitting sideways in silt. That's fine. It's still enough to grab small stuff.

What you're not going to do with this is drag it along a river bottom looking for safes or bike frames. It doesn't have the mass or the surface area for that. If you throw it into a spot with a lot of heavy debris, you're more likely to get it stuck than to pull anything up — and losing a $200 magnet to a snag feels terrible, but losing an $8 magnet to a snag is just... a shrug and a lesson learned.

That's actually the thing I keep coming back to. The price removes the anxiety. You're not babying it. You're not nervous about the coating or the eyebolt or whether you tied the right knot. You chuck it in and see what happens. For someone brand new to this, that freedom to just mess around without consequence is genuinely useful.

You do need to bring your own rope. That's not a knock — it just is what it is.

The 36mm size is also beginner-friendly in a practical way — it's light enough that a kid can handle it, small enough that you're not fighting with it in tight spots, and easy to carry in a jacket pocket. I've fished spots where a big double-sided magnet would've been a liability — narrow bridge rails, shallow spots with a lot of junk — and something this size would've been the smarter call.

Is it the magnet I'd use on a serious outing? No. My go-to pull force is about four times this. But I've recommended this one to three or four people who were on the fence about the hobby, and every single one of them came back wanting to upgrade. That's kind of the point.

It's a starter magnet that actually works well enough to make you want to keep going.