Platinum Online Products 2000LB Double-Sided Magnet — Worth It?
A double-sided 2000 lb rated magnet built for dragging along the bottom — two magnetic faces, mid-range price, serious coverage for the way a lot of people actually fish.
I drag. I know some people drop straight down off bridges and that works great — but I spend most of my time walking riverbanks, pulling the magnet along the bottom behind me. And for that, a single-faced magnet is kind of a waste of half your hardware.
The Platinum 2000LB double-sided magnet is built exactly for that style. Two faces, both pulling, both picking up whatever the riverbed's been collecting for the last few decades.
At $39.99 it sits in a weird spot — not cheap, not expensive — and honestly that's where I'd expect to find something like this. The question is whether the real-world pull matches what's on the box. Spoiler: it's complicated, but not in a bad way.
The first thing I noticed when I pulled this out of the packaging was the weight. It's heavier than it looks in the photos — solid, no flex, no rattling. Both faces are smooth and flat, which matters more than people realize. A warped or uneven face kills your contact area, and contact area is basically everything when you're dragging.
Two faces. That's the whole pitch. And it actually works.
I took this out to a stretch of the Fox River in Illinois — not a glamour spot, just a muddy bank near an old road crossing where I'd pulled a few corroded bolts and one genuinely baffling cast iron doorknob before. I was expecting the usual: a couple of nails, maybe a rusted bracket if I was lucky. I tied a figure-8 on the rope, swung it out, and just walked. The magnet travels flat along the bottom when you drag it right, and both faces are working the whole time — top face catching anything that's sitting proud of the sediment, bottom face grinding along the actual riverbed. Within maybe twenty minutes I had a bike chain, a hinge plate, and what I'm pretty sure is part of an old padlock — three separate pieces all stuck to different spots on the magnet at the same time. That doesn't happen with a single-face setup. Not like that.
Now — the 2000 lb number. I know how this works. That's the total rated pull across both faces, so each face is doing roughly half that. Which means you're not getting 2000 lbs of pull on any one object. You're getting two independent magnetic faces each pulling somewhere in the 1000 lb range, give or take depending on surface contact and the specific geometry of whatever you've latched onto. I'm not saying that's bad — it's still a lot — but if you're expecting to yank a rifle out of solid silt with one clean pull, just know the math doesn't exactly work that way in the mud.
For dragging? Genuinely great. For vertical drops off a bridge railing? I'd think about whether a single stronger face might serve you better.
The coating has held up fine through maybe a dozen outings. No chipping on the faces, which is the part that actually matters — once a magnet face chips it starts losing contact consistency and you start missing things. I've had cheaper double-sided magnets that looked fine until the second trip and then started flaking near the edges where the rope hardware meets the body. This one hasn't done that.
My one actual complaint: the eyebolt threading. It's fine, it's functional, but I retorqued it after the third use because I could feel a very slight wobble. Not dangerous, just the kind of thing that makes you stop and double-check your knot when you're mid-session. Easy fix, not a dealbreaker — but worth knowing before you tie on and launch it into twelve feet of murky water without inspecting it first.
If you're the kind of person who drags along canal banks or walks slow bends in rivers, this is the magnet I'd tell you to look at. Two faces working simultaneously while you walk — it's just more efficient. The $39.99 price is honest for what you get.
