VNDUEEY 700LB Single Sided Kit — Good Enough to Start

I handed one of these to my nephew last summer at the creek behind my sister's place. He's eleven, never done this before, and I wasn't about to let him chuck a double-sided magnet off a footbridge on his first attempt — not because it's dangerous exactly, but because a heavy double-sided will stick to every wet rock and rebar-adjacent surface on the way down and then you've got a screaming kid and a magnet that won't budge and a ruined afternoon. The VNDUEEY single-sided was the right call. He dropped it in, pulled it around the bottom for about forty minutes, and came up with two bent bolts and what I'm pretty sure was a 1970s bottle cap. He was absolutely losing his mind about it.

That's the whole use case for this kit, honestly.

The magnet itself felt fine in hand — not the most reassuring weight, not the kind of solid thunk you get from a Brute or a Wukong, but it's not supposed to be. It's a starter piece. The coating seemed consistent. Nothing obviously wrong with the threading when I checked it before he used it, which — honestly — is more than I can say for a couple of budget magnets I've messed with at this price.

The rope is the weakest part and I'm not going to gloss over it. It's fine for casual bridge drops with a kid, fine for shallow water in a park. If you're thinking about tying this off and dragging the bottom of a serious river, I'd swap it out before you go. Not because it's going to snap immediately, just because I've seen cheaper ropes on budget kits start fraying faster than they should, and the hassle of retieing a wet knot in the cold isn't something I'd put myself through if I could avoid it. A spool of decent paracord or 8mm braided isn't expensive. It's just worth doing before the first real outing.

700LB pull force sounds impressive on paper and then you actually start magnet fishing and realize that number is doing a lot of work in the marketing department. Real-world pull — angle, water resistance, surface contact — is always going to feel different. For a beginner pulling stuff off a creek bottom or a low bridge railing, 700LB is more than enough. You're not going to be limited by this magnet when you're starting out. You're going to be limited by your technique, your rope management, your patience. That's true of everyone who's new to this.

The single-sided design is genuinely the right call for a first-timer.

Double-sided looks cooler on a product page but it catches on everything — both sides are magnetized, so you've got twice the surface area to snag submerged junk you weren't planning to interact with. For a kid or someone who's never done this before, single-sided is simpler to work with. Drop it, drag it, pull it up. The learning curve is already steep enough without fighting your own magnet on the way back up.

At $21.99 you can also just... buy two. Keep one in the car. Give one to a kid and not feel like you've handed over something precious. There's something kind of freeing about gear that's cheap enough to be replaceable — you're not babying it, you're not anxious about it, you're just using it.

If this is for a ten-year-old who watched one video and has been asking for a magnet ever since, this is genuinely the right purchase. If you're already three months in and you've been using a cheap magnet and you know this hobby is yours now — this isn't the upgrade you're looking for. But that's not who it's for.