Magnetpro 1700LB Neodymium Magnet — Worth the $40?

I'll be honest — when I first got my hands on this, the magnet felt solid. Good weight, decent coating, the threading on the eyebolt looked clean. Nothing about holding it in your hand screams cheap. That part surprised me a little.

But here's the thing about neodymium magnets: they all feel good in your hand.

The real question is what happens after a few months of dragging it through silt and gravel and whatever mystery slop is sitting at the bottom of your local canal. I've pulled up chunks of rebar, an old cast iron pan — thing was enormous, no idea how it got there, probably fell off a bridge sometime around 1967 — and a truly depressing amount of fishing weights that have just been accumulating down there forever. A magnet either holds up to that kind of abuse or it doesn't. And with Magnetpro, I just don't have enough sessions logged to say with confidence it holds up the way an AnglerMag or FINDMAG does after a year of regular use.

That's not a knock on the magnet itself. It performed fine on the water. I used it off a footbridge over a shallow stretch of river — late October, water was low, could actually see some of what I was dragging over — and it grabbed onto a bike frame that had been down there long enough to have algae growing in the spokes. 1700lbs of claimed pull force is always going to be the lab number, not the real-world number, but it moved that bike frame, so it's clearly not weak.

The coating looked untouched after that session. I'll give it that.

What I can't give it is the benefit of the doubt that comes from brand track record. When I buy an AnglerMag or a Brute, I know other people have been using those for years and the complaints are documented — meaning I know what the actual failure modes are. With Magnetpro, you're a little more in the dark. Maybe it holds up perfectly for two years. Maybe the coating starts delaminating after six months of cold water. I don't know, and that uncertainty is real.

For someone who's new to this and wants to try it without spending sixty or seventy dollars — or someone who wants a backup magnet to keep in the bag without feeling bad about it — forty bucks for this is genuinely hard to argue with. The advertised specs are competitive. It doesn't feel like a toy. And if it lasts you even one solid season, you've gotten your money's worth and then some.

I just wouldn't make it my primary magnet if I was planning to fish seriously. Not yet. Not until there's more out there from people who've been running it hard for a while.