Just found another thing rare earth magnets are good for – fishing wires at a 90 degree angle….

Normally, if I’m trying to run wires, I use fish tape (also known as a draw wire or draw tape). It works great if you are trying to run stuff through conduit, or in a fairly straight line. Where it doesn’t work so well is if you are trying to go around a corner.

In the past, my solution has been to feed in wires from both sides with hooks bent at the ends, and try and hook them together. It generally works after a lot of attempts, a lot of swearing and a lot of frustration.

Today, I had the bright idea of using rare earth magnets to make the process a whole lot easier…. one goes on the end of a string that gets dropped through the vertical access, the other on a rigid pipe or stick that is fed in the horizontal one. Get the two close to each other, and ‘click’, they are attached and you can pull the string out with the stick. If you need to feed up and over, just use an appropriate length of pipe, and wire instead of string (since it’s hard to feed string through a pipe). The wire can be fed through the pipe, and you can use the pipe to lift the magnet into position. Once the two magnets have made contact, the pipe can be lowered – the wire will pull through the pipe and you can then pull that through as before.