Magnetic Bits Holder From Old Speaker

If you're anything like me, when I am screwing, drilling and doing general DIY I am constantly looking for screws, screwdriver bits and drill bits I previously put down somewhere. To help the situation somewhat I decided to make a magnetic holder I could use to keep everything together in the same place (that's the idea anyway).

I wanted to make it wall mountable so I always knew where it was when I needed it. I also wanted it to look nice, so embedded the magnet in to wood.

I had an old broken speaker from my car so used that for the magnet.

Materials

Magent (mine was from an old speaker)

Wood (I used monkey puzzle)

Epoxy

Sandpaper and oil for finishing

Tools

Saw

Wood turning lathe

I have started to use Fusion 360 a little bit more recently so I made a video of the process.

It's quite basic and only really uses circles and extrusions but also goes through making bodies in to components and creating joints to fix bits to each other.

I also played about with animation and drawings but haven't made any videos of that process. The main model is attached though so you can download and have a mess about with it.

I looked on the internet to find easy ways to get the magnet from the speaker but approached it in a slightly easier way than I found, which didn't involve destroying the speaker cone itself.

I started by removing the metal plate at the back of the speaker with a screwdriver and hammer. It came off fairly easily.

I then went for the magnet itself again with the hammer, and it came off in a few hefty whacks, and had another plate attached to it.

I then used the screwdriver to get this plate of the magnet using a little more caution as I didn't want to snap the magnet.

The main body is basically a box without a lid with a magnet epoxy'd to the bottom. I had some monkey puzzle wood I got from a friend a couple of years ago which should be fairly dry by now so used that as it should look quite interesting.

To turn the main body

• Cut out a rough circle on the band saw
• Mount it between centers and put a tenon on one side
• Mounted the tenon in the chuck
• Trued up the outside
• Marked on the size of hole for the magnet
• Cut a hole in to the cylinder until it was the right size
• Sanded and oiled
• Unmounted the cylinder and remounted on the opposite side by expanding the chuck
• flatten the base
• Sanded and oiled
• Epoxy'd the magnet inside and clamped

To turn the plate holder I used a 1 in thick bit of brown oak as the holder only needed to be narrow.

The steps were as the main body apart from I left the middle part as the plate had a hole in it and this section would be used to screw it to the wall.

The hardest part was parting the holder from the base as I only had a very small amount of wood to play with.

I then sanded, oiled and epoxy'd the plate in to the holder.

I now had the two parts so the plate holder fit inside the main magnetic part. I then drilled a countersunk hole in to the plate holder and screwed it to my plywood tool tidy. I could then easily stick it to the wall and remove it to use.

As the magnet is a donut shape it does hold things in a funny pattern but it defiantly works.

If you liked this Instructable please vote for me in the magnets contest.

Thanks