Magnetic Parts Bowl

Small bolts vanish. They disappear into the bench's grease tray. They roll off the edge and into the corner of the floor that you'll discover during next quarter's deep clean. They sink into the bottom of a parts cleaner. The Magnetic Parts Bowl 2086 stops all of this for the price of a magnet.

The bowl is steel with a magnetized base. Steel bolts, washers, jam nuts, retaining rings, and seal-plate hardware stick to the bottom and stay there until you pick them up. Drop the parts into the bowl as you remove them from the workpiece; reach in and pull them out as you reassemble. The work runs faster because nothing's getting lost between bench operations.

Why it works for non-ferrous parts too

The magnetism does the heavy lifting for steel parts, but the bowl is useful for non-ferrous parts (titanium bolts, aluminum spacers, plastic washers) for a different reason: the bowl's rim contains them. A magnetic flat (without a bowl) only catches what touches it; the bowl's wall catches what doesn't. Pour titanium bolts in, and they stack inside the rim rather than rolling off the bench.

When the bowl pays for itself

• Rebuilding a shifter (a dozen small steel bolts that all look alike, all critical to assembly)
• Replacing a stem (the stem's clamp bolts plus the headset's compression cap and bolt)
• Working on time-trial bike front-ends with multiple integrated components
• Suspension fork service (shims, spacers, retaining rings, all small and easily misplaced)
• Any disassembly where the order of removal matters; lay parts out in the bowl in disassembly order, retrieve in reverse for reassembly

Specs

• Steel bowl, magnetized base
• Compact footprint sized for a working bench
• Article number: 2086

Built in Zreče, Slovenia

Unior has been forging hand tools in Zreče since 1919, and is the official technical partner of multiple World Tour and downhill teams. The magnetic parts bowl is one of those general-workshop pieces that exists in any well-organized hand-tool catalog. Ours is the cycling-shop sized version of the broader workshop catalog; large enough for the parts a typical service generates, small enough to fit on a working bench corner.

Pro tip from our mechanics

The most underrated workflow trick in a working shop is laying small parts out in the magnetic bowl in disassembly order, then assembling them in reverse. The bowl is the cheap version of a parts diagram, and it works because the parts can't move once they're in. Our workshop hand tools guide covers the small bench fixtures that earn their cost on the first day: Workshop hand tools every bike shop needs →