My Greatest Invention: The Magnetic Hat

Working atop ladders (as I often do) it becomes difficult to juggle the various saws and drills and hammers and such while climbing up and down. The worst is keeping the screws or nails close at hand while screwing or nailing. I hate keeping them in my mouth because they taste awful and probably contribute to heavy metal poisoning. Ladders make nail aprons impractical. So I came up with an invention. My crew urges me to patent it, but I'd rather share it with the world. I had my favorite floppy hat and some leftover Neodymium magnets left over from the LED throwie project. I made a magnetic hat.

Place a small handful of fasteners on top of my head and walk around all day.



I got this sturdy canvas hat at REI in 2003 to take a trip down to Mexico. The brass snaps and vent holes have a slight salt water patina. It also has five or six different colors of paint on it. This particular hat is no longer available from the REI web page.


The unique feature that makes this hat so suitable for magnetizing is the map pocket.


Inside the map pocket (very handy, by the way, for maps, money or anything flat) there's a oval piece of foam so that the top of the hat holds its shape.


The piece of foam is removable so I took it out and masking taped four magnets in a diamond pattern. These 10mm magnets came from Gaussboys, but United Nuclear stocks them as well.

I imagine that a person could tape magnets on the inside of any hat, but I like to remove the magnets before washing the hat so it doesn't stick to the inside of the washing machine. These magnets will lose their magnetism at about 180 degrees F so they ought not to be washed anyway.

It is important to keep powerful magnets away from cyborgs.

The small magnets mean easy release when I need a fastener but I would like to get a few more in the pattern so I could hold more stuff. As it stands, the hat will only hold a small handful of items. A bigger handful would be more useful.

My next invention will be a larger magnet that clips to the brim of baseball caps. It's so nice to simply reach to my head and have a nail in my hand without having to take off my gloves.