FINDMAG Double Sided 2625LBS Kit — Worth the $48?

The first thing I noticed when I opened the FINDMAG kit was the magnet itself — it's heavier than it looks in the photos. Like, you pick it up and you go "okay, there's actually something here." Double-sided neodymium, both faces pulling, and for forty-eight dollars that's a legitimate thing to put in your hands on a first trip out.

I handed this kit to my cousin last spring before we hit a canal near his place — a slow, gross stretch of water outside Columbus that I'm convinced hasn't been fished or cleaned since roughly 1987. He'd never done this before. Watched one video, decided he needed to try it. We tied a palomar on the rope, dropped it off a low bridge, and inside twenty minutes he'd pulled up a rusted padlock, something that might have been a garden trowel, and a corroded bolt the size of my thumb that was almost certainly not meant to end up in that canal.

He was completely hooked. Kit paid for itself in his mind immediately.

Here's the honest part about the rope: it's fine. It's not great. It's the rope equivalent of a gas station granola bar — it does what rope is supposed to do, it holds the knot, it hauls things up, but you're not going to fall in love with it. After a few sessions the outer braid starts to feel a little rough in your hands, and if you're not wearing the gloves that come with the kit — and you should be wearing gloves, always — you'll feel it. The gloves themselves run a bit small, which I wasn't expecting, so if you've got bigger hands you might want to grab a separate pair before your first trip.

The carabiner is what it is. I've upgraded mine. That's not a knock on FINDMAG specifically — I've upgraded the carabiner on kits that cost three times as much, because a good locking carabiner is just something worth having and the ones that come with starter kits are never quite right. Swap it out. Costs five dollars and you'll feel better.

But here's the thing — none of that matters for a first outing.

The magnet itself has real pull. I've seen people online dismiss 2625 lbs as marketing math, and sure, you're not going to hit that combined number in actual water conditions, but you don't need to. What you need is enough pull to drag a rusted chunk of metal off a silt bottom, and this thing handles that without drama. I've watched it pull up a small bike tire — the whole rim, caked in mud — from maybe fifteen feet down in murky water. Whatever the "real" pull force is, it's enough for what you're doing.

The thread locker in the kit is a small touch that I genuinely appreciate. That eyebolt needs to be on there tight, and including the thread locker tells me someone at FINDMAG has seen what happens when it's not. Use it. Don't skip it because you think it's optional.

If you're buying this for yourself as a first kit, you'll get more out of it than you expect. If you're buying it for someone who saw magnet fishing on TikTok and wants to try it — your teenager, a friend, whoever — it's a completely reasonable thing to hand someone and say "go see if you like it." The barrier to entry is low and the magnet is actually good enough to find real stuff.

The rope'll probably get upgraded eventually. The carabiner too. But the magnet? You might just keep using it.