The lifting magnet has been adopted for the handling of materials in all branches of the steel and iron industry. It is used for handling pig iron, scrap, castings, billets, tubes, rails, plates, for loading and unloading cars and vessels, and for handling skull-cracker balls and miscellaneous magnetic material.
Probably one of the best illustrations of the saving accomplished by means of a lifting magnet is its use in unloading pig iron from steamers. By the old hand method it required twenty-eight men, two days and two nights, to unload a cargo of 4,000,000 pounds. When the lifting magnet was introduced, the total time for unloading was reduced to eleven hours, and was done by two men whose labor consisted in manipulating the controllers in the cages of the cranes. Thus two men and two magnets did the work of twenty-eight men in less than one-fourth of the time. Furthermore, the vessels were enabled to double their number of productive trips.
36-Inch Lifting Magnet Picking up 3,500-Pound Winding Drum
In railroad work, lifting magnets are at the present time used principally in scrap yards and around store-room platforms, where it is necessary to handle iron and steel rapidly and economically. For this class of work magnets are generally used in connection with a locomotive crane, making a self-contained, self-propelled unit which may be operated over the shop-yard tracks as required. The use of this combination has reduced very greatly the cost of handling both new and scrap material, both by reducing the actual expense of handling and by enabling the material to be handled much more rapidly than was before possible.
Probably the best possible endorsement of the waterproof construction of the modern lifting magnet is the fact that one of them was successfully operated seventy feet below the surface of the Mississippi River. At New Orleans a large load of kegged nails was raised from a depth of seventy feet. A load of steel cotton ties was raised near Natchez and a barge of iron wire near Pittsburgh. And these are only a few instances of such work.
The magnets used in this river work were three and one-half feet in diameter. They were dropped into the stream, the current turned on, and five or six kegs of nails or bundles of wire were raised each trip. The nails weighed 200 pounds to the keg, so there were lifted each time, from 1,000 to 1,200 pounds from the bed of the river.
The variety of uses to which these magnets may be put are shown by the accompanying illustrations and there are many industries handling iron and steel where the introduction of the modern, high-duty lifting magnet will effect a great saving in time and labor.
36-Inch Magnet Handling Heavy Castings