Mechani Mags Launches Low Headroom Dry Magnets for Conveyors
Across South Africa's production calendar, the arrival of September 2026 tends to send plant teams scrambling to lock in the shutdown slots that will see them through to year end, and protecting conveyors reliably climbs that priority list. Mechani Mags, the Boksburg-based conveyor magnet maker operating from Bisset Road in JetPark, is seizing the lead-in to the last quarter to spotlight a corner of its range that plant engineers frequently write off as out of reach: the low head-room version of its dry-type overband magnet, alongside oil to dry conversions of units already in service and the spares and auxiliaries that keep a working magnet in operation.
What holds people back is a down-to-earth limitation. Any suspended overband belt magnet needs to sit above a conveyor with sufficient gap to do its job, yet in plants built on cramped layouts, or where extra kit has later been bolted in above or alongside the belt, that gap has vanished. What follows is a stretch of conveyor with no ferrous protection at all, not through any reluctance on the operator's part, but because a standard suspended unit cannot be squeezed into place. Among the headline features of its dry-type magnet, Mechani Mags lists a low head-room model, and its products page notes that magnets can be adapted to suit confined spaces.
What the dry-type magnet does on a conveyor line
There is a single purpose behind putting Magnetic separators on a conveyor, which is to pull ferrous tramp metal from a flowing stream of material before it reaches anything costly. Picture a stray bolt, a snapped tooth, a length of rebar or a fragment left over from an earlier repair riding into a crusher, a mill or a screen, and you have the kind of incident that converts a routine week into a chaotic one. The company characterises its dry-type units as suspended self-cleaning over-band belt magnets built to strip tramp metal from conveyed materials across mining, processing and recycling, and it frames them as conveyor cleaning and protection gear rather than kit for upgrading the material itself.
Continuous running comes down to the self-cleaning setup. The overband belt sweeps captured metal off the magnet's face and dumps it clear of the conveyor, which means the magnet carries on working without anyone needing to halt the line and clear it by hand. Where tramp metal volumes stay low enough that a scheduled clean will do, Mechani Mags supplies the identical magnet in a manual-clean variant.
Why the dry design changed the retrofit conversation
Earlier overband electromagnets ran on oil cooling, and oil drags along its own list of burdens: contamination should a seal give way, corrosion, the sheer weight of the unit, and the downtime that fluid management demands. The current generation from Mechani Mags does without oil and without cooling fans altogether. According to the company, this dry design holds a premium energy efficiency rating on a par with the IE4 standard and is 50 percent more energy efficient than standard models, producing identical magnetic power on half the electrical draw.
The product page lays out the engineering behind that claim. Rectangular-section aluminium coils carry Class H insulation rated at 180 degrees Celsius. The unit is fitted with a stainless steel wear plate and internally welded lifting lugs, driven by a WEG IE3 motor paired with an SEW gearbox, and rides on four crowned carbon steel pulleys. Belt-slip and belt-tear detection operates together with a PT100 temperature probe, so the magnet signals its own state instead of failing silently. With an IP66 housing fully sealed against dust and water, the magnet is engineered to run at any position and incline angle, inverted included. Where installations are underground or otherwise hazardous, the unit can arrive Ex certified.
Oil to dry conversion without rebuilding the power supply
Where a plant is still operating an ageing oil-cooled overband unit, the company puts forward a conversion path in place of an outright replacement project. By its own account, Mechani Mags can generally convert an existing oil-cooled electromagnet into an equivalent strength dry-type electromagnet with no need to alter the existing power supply units. For anyone drawing up a shutdown plan that counts, since the expense and schedule risk in an upgrade like this normally live in the electrical work and the structural steel rather than the magnet.
Workshop capability backs the same logic. Any make or brand of magnet, not just its own, can be repaired and upgraded by Mechani Mags, whose Boksburg workshop is equipped to take on any size magnet up to 20 tons. Loan units may be on offer while a customer's own magnet is being serviced, workmanship comes guaranteed, and the company provides a free assessment with a strip and quote on a faulty magnet delivered to the JetPark workshop, or will organise collection.
Detection and removal are different jobs
Talk of overband magnets rarely happens without Conveyor metal detector equipment coming up as well, and keeping the two roles apart pays off when a plant maps out its protection strategy. A detector alerts the control room that metal has appeared on the belt and can set off a stop or a diverter. A magnet, by contrast, physically hoists the ferrous portion out of the material stream and discharges it. Removal is the side of that pairing Mechani Mags works on, and its site assessment service sets out to pin down what a given conveyor and material stream genuinely require before anything gets specified.
The wider product range
Though Dry magnetic separator units head up the range, they belong to a wider catalogue. Rare earth magnet elements power the ferrochrome magnet, which is purpose-built for parting ferrochrome from slag. Lifting magnets come as extra heavy duty sealed units for scrap handling, ball loading and furnace loading, with a choice of duty cycles, and the company states plainly that they are not meant for suspension over conveyor belts. Demagnetising coils are available for demagnetising material passing through the centre of the coils, while drum magnets or magnetic pulleys take care of separation as material tips over the head end of a belt. Fan-cooled electromagnets and the older oil-cooled self-clean and manual-clean overband types stay on the roster, together with permanent magnets and fully bespoke designs.
Auxiliaries and spares keep the installed base running
A magnet sidelined because nobody can source a gearbox or a run of belting is a magnet protecting nothing. To cover that, Mechani Mags stocks power supply units suited to any mains supply voltage up to 1000VAC at 50 or 60Hz, control panels that work with almost any electromagnet system, three-phase heavy duty solid-state bridge rectifiers and appropriate DC cabling. Adjustable suspension chain slings come complete with rating and identification tags plus a certificate of compliance. Beam crawlers and trolleys are on hand in motorised, non-motorised and geared-chain-pull forms, together with spring-driven cable reeling drums and festoon systems for DC cable runs. On the replacement parts side there are belts, pulleys, gearboxes, motors, bearings, shafts, couplings and DC terminal poles. Type F flame retardant conveyor belting ships with test certificates, and reinforced heavier duty belting is offered expressly for use with magnets.
Site services and compliance work
Year-round, Mechani Mags holds a trained site service team on standby, ready to travel anywhere in the world. Its on-site menu takes in gauss, or magnetic strength, testing and reporting, routine inspection reporting, certificate of compliance inspection, testing and reporting, commissioning support and release inspections, fault finding, installation support, and general repairs and part replacement wherever these are achievable in place, plus site assessment for a new magnet application. For any operation gearing up for an audit or wrapping up a shutdown scope, that pairing of testing and documentation usually carries as much weight as the hardware.
Head office and workshop sit at 30 Bisset Road, corner Hargan, JetPark, Boksburg, 1460, in Gauteng, with office hours of 07:30 to 16:30 Monday to Thursday and 07:30 to 14:30 on Friday. Shipping reaches worldwide, and the company issues its company profile under the banner 50 Years Strong. Complete product detail, downloadable technical documents, support services and contact options all appear on the Mechani Mags website at https://africanmagnets.com/.
About Mechani Mags
Mechani Mags is a South African maker of conveyor magnets and magnetic separators used to remove tramp metal in the mining, processing and recycling sectors. Working from a head office and workshop in JetPark, Boksburg, Gauteng, it designs and builds dry-type suspended self-cleaning overband belt magnets, ferrochrome magnets, lifting magnets, drum magnets, demagnetising coils and custom magnet solutions, and furnishes the control panels, belting, chain sets and spares that keep them running. The company repairs and upgrades magnets of any make in a workshop rated for units up to 20 tons, carries out oil to dry conversions, and delivers on-site gauss testing, inspection and compliance reporting via a service team that travels both locally and internationally.
Media Contact
Mechani Mags
Email: info@mecmag.co.za
Phone: +27 11 397 6870
Website: https://africanmagnets.com/