Do you remember the iconic conveyor belt scene from I Love Lucy? Lucy and Ethel are working at a candy factory but are warned they’ll be fired if they fail to wrap a single piece of candy. Naturally, things are never easy for the duo, and as the belt begins to move faster and faster... well, cue the laughter! But did you know that permanent magnets are used to operate real-life conveyor belts and pulley systems? Magnets are highly effective at separating certain materials, making them ideal in an industry like recycling where you must sift between plastics, metals, paper, and hundreds of other products along a single conveyor belt. Another good example is the food industry (maybe in a candy factory!) — you wouldn’t want anything dangerous slipping into the final product before mass distribution. Most operations will place a magnetic pulley at the end of the conveyor belt as part of their separation efforts. How Magnetic Pulleys Work If you’ve never seen one, you may be surprised to find that a magnetic pulley doesn’t look like a typical pulley. Instead of a giant hook with a rope draped over it, a magnetic pulley looks like a large drum at the end of a conveyor belt, just like the one Lucy and Ethel struggled with. The belt wraps around the magnetic drum before looping back to the beginning. Before products reach the magnetic pulley, they have already gone through a series of separation techniques, which may also involve magnets, to sort out larger ferrous material. The magnetic pulley resides at the end of the separation process — a last line of defense, so to speak, against unwanted foreign particles.  As the conveyor belt wraps around the magnetic pulley, any ferrous material, such as an errant nail, will attract to the magnetic drum through the belt. As it wraps around and down, the non-ferrous material is pulled down by gravity and deposited into a chute for further processing, while ferrous material holds onto the magnetic drum long enough to travel beneath the belt and then be deposited into a separate chute and removed from the facility.  Apex Magnets for Industry At Apex, we stock permanent magnets like the ones used in magnetic pulley systems, but that’s not all. We also sell magnetic sweepers to keep the factory floor clean and safe. Plus, if we do say so ourselves, our products work much more efficiently than Lucy and Ethel.