MHDMAG 1000LB Double Sided Magnet — Worth the $26?
The MHDMAG 1000LB Double Sided Fishing Magnet gives you dual-face coverage at a price that's hard to argue with. It's not fancy, but it gets the job done.
Double-sided magnets have one job: coverage. You drop it, it grabs stuff on the way down and on the way up. The MHDMAG does that, for $25.99, which is a number that's hard to get mad at.
I'll be straight — this isn't the magnet I reach for every time. But if you've already decided you want a dual-face design and you don't want to spend real money on it, this is a reasonable way to get there.
A thousand pounds across two faces, under $26. That's the pitch. Here's the longer version.
I picked this up because a buddy of mine kept asking whether double-sided magnets were actually worth doing. My usual answer is "not for drag fishing, not really" — but he wasn't trying to drag fish. He was dropping vertically off a dock on this little reservoir outside of town, the kind of place where stuff just sits there waiting on a flat muddy bottom. For that? Two faces makes total sense. So I grabbed the MHDMAG, mostly so I could give him a real answer.
First thing I noticed was how compact it felt. Smaller than I expected for something rated at a thousand pounds.
That rating is doing some work, by the way. I'm not saying it's lying — I'm saying that advertised pull force on budget magnets and actual performance in muddy real-world conditions are two different conversations. What I can tell you is that it picked up a corroded bolt, an old padlock, and something that was probably a bike lock — all in one drop on that dock. Whatever it was pulling, it was pulling it. I'm not out here with a scale.
The coating felt fine. Not precious, not something I'd be terrified to scratch, but nothing was flaking after a session either. I've seen cheaper magnets come out of the box already looking rough. This one didn't give me that vibe.
The eyebolt is where budget magnets usually cut corners. This one felt okay — not impressive, just okay.
Here's the thing I keep coming back to with this magnet. It's $25.99. That's the whole context. At that price, I'm not expecting it to perform like my main setup. I'm expecting it to be a second magnet I can hand to someone who wants to try this hobby without me feeling bad about giving them a piece of junk. And it clears that bar. My buddy used it for an afternoon, found a handful of stuff, and didn't complain once about the magnet itself — only about the rope, which was his own rope, so that's on him.
If drag fishing is your main thing, I'd probably still steer you toward a single-sided setup — something with all its pull concentrated in one face tends to perform better when you're moving across a bottom. The dual-face design earns its keep when you're fishing vertically, when you want that coverage on the drop and on the retrieve. That's the use case where this actually makes sense.
For most people reading this, that probably describes at least some of what they're doing.
The budget double-sided space is pretty crowded and a lot of what's in it is genuinely not worth touching. This one's at least in the conversation. I've seen people spend more on magnets that impressed me less — which says something, even if I'm not sure exactly what.
