BILLET/Rail Handling Material Handling Magnets

Walker provides heavy steel mill duty magnets for handling hot or cold, billets, slabs, and rail. Walker billet and rail handling magnets are available in a wide range of sizes to accommodate your application. Because the majority of our magnets are welded, fabricated designs, we can customize the size as well as many optional features.

There are two basic magnetic circuits that we use in the designing and building of these magnets; The well recognized “GRABBER” three-pole design and the “BI-POLAR” two-pole design.

The Grabber magnet was developed to help mills that were having difficulty lifting full layers of billets due to the air gaps between the magnet’s face and the billets. These gaps are not unusual in normal steel mill production and it was time-consuming to make return trips to retrieve bent billets that were not lifted the first time. Walker engineers designed billet magnets with very high penetrating power that are able to “snap-up” the bent billets, making full, dynamic lifts.

The Grabber magnet is most efficient for ambient temperature billet handling, but can easily be supplied with Walker’s Heatmaster features for handling billets at elevated temperatures.

The Bi-polar design has all of the high powered penetrating ability of the Grabber style lifting magnets but has proven to have superior heat resistant capabilities due to the location and attitude of the coil. These magnets are generally taller and heavier than the equivalent capacity Grabber style magnet, but these features contribute to the advantages that these magnets have for higher temperature steel handling.