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Does any one remember the first time they used a magnet I had got a home made magnet by chance and the bloke said they are deadly, I had to have it and this was in 2002. After reading about them in various magazines the £50 I paid seemed ok as they were something like £200/300 in the adverts i remember settting it up in the garden and turning it on but seeing it fling round at a rate looked totally stupid and I had the farmer taking the mick out of me saying I had been had. I set up on the swathed rape not knowing what it was all about and I remember that by the time I walked back to the hide and stood up I saw a pigeon going round it. I got around 50 on the day and the farmer said a few days later that someone was shooting the other day, well he didn’t know what to say when I said it was me. i dont think many people were using them in my area and the results were great and am still using it to this day.

At last I have manged to get some pigeons on my ground after a dearth of them for most of the winter. 8 days shooting in the past 10 days have produced bags of 16 , 10, 20 , 20 , 45 , 10 , 10 and a mixed bag of rooks, jackdaws and pigeons totaling 33 yesterday. The birds were shot over rape, clover and on a cultivated field under a flightline to a stubble. As yet the drillings have been used very little. Not great bags , but after struggling to get into double figuars a welcome change this winter. The conditions in Norfolk for the last 6 weeks have been very cold with daytime temperatures only just creeping above 0C by a degree or two and usualy bell below freezing at the start of the day and this has a serious effect on my pigeon magnet. On Tuseday the arm of the magnet arm snaped at the joint that slips over the rotary connection. A mate on the farm did a quick weilding job that held well , but the arm snapped again higher up the next day. Fortunetly I had an old arm from another disused magnet that fitted so used that yesterday only for the whole top plate housing the arm conections to break. The stress of two dead pigeons spinning around on the magnet for hours at a time must be pretty high and coupled with the intence cold must have made the metal pretty brittle , but I have never experianced this before. Any one else had similar problems. ( the magnet is about 10 years old ).