Magnet or grapple? Telling material handler attachments apart
Stand at the fence line of any scrap yard long enough and you'll see a Sennebogen or a Fuchs swinging something on the end of its stick. From a distance, both attachments look like a dark blob on a boom. Up close, the difference is obvious. From a drive-by or a photo, it takes knowing what to look for.
The visual tells
An electromagnet is a flat steel disc, usually round, bolted straight to the end of the boom with no moving parts below it. There's a cable running up the stick to the generator or power pack on the carrier, because the magnet needs continuous juice to hold a load. When it's not lifting, it just hangs there, dead flat, no fingers, no jaws. If you watch one work a pile, the operator lowers it onto the scrap, lets it sit a beat, then lifts a clump that sticks to the face of the disc like iron filings on a tabletop magnet. No squeezing motion at all.
A grapple is built the opposite way. It's got curved tines, usually four or five, hinged at a central pivot, with hydraulic cylinders you can see running along each claw. The operator opens the tines wide, drops them around a pile, and closes them to clamp down. There's a grabbing motion every single cycle. No cable running to a generator, because it runs off the carrier's own hydraulics, same as the stick and boom.
If you're trying to tell the two apart in a photo, the fastest tell is the cable. A magnet drags a power line. A grapple doesn't need one. The second tell is the shape at rest. A magnet parked on a pile looks like a manhole cover sitting on scrap. A grapple parked on a pile looks like a claw, open or half-closed, with daylight visible between the tines.
Why the attachment tells you what the yard handles
The attachment tells you what's moving through the gate.
A yard running mostly magnets is working clean ferrous. Shredded auto scrap, structural steel, rebar, the stuff that sticks. Magnets are fast for sorting a ferrous pile because the attachment does the separating. Drop it in, pull out the steel, leave the rest.
A yard running grapples is handling mixed metal, demo debris, or anything with non-ferrous mixed in. Copper, aluminum, stainless, insulated wire. None of that sticks to a magnet, so the operator has to grab it. Grapples also show up on yards doing a lot of truck loading and railcar loading, because you can set a load down gently with a grapple in a way you can't with a magnet dropping a clump.
Some yards run both, a magnet handler on the ferrous pile and a grapple handler on the non-ferrous or mixed pile, sometimes even the same machine with attachments swapped depending on the shift's inbound material. If you see a yard with one of each parked near separate piles, that's usually a yard sorting ferrous from non-ferrous on-site rather than shipping it out mixed.
None of this is a hard rule. A demolition contractor might run a grapple on structural steel because the pieces are too big and awkward for a magnet to hold cleanly. But as a rule of thumb for reading a yard from the outside, fence-line or aerial, the attachment mix tells you a lot about what's coming through the scale house.
That's the same logic we build into counting and classifying the handlers working every scrap yard in a market, down to the attachment type, on a quarterly pass, so you know which yards are running ferrous-heavy fleets and which ones are set up for mixed metal before you ever call on them.
If sizing out a scrap market before the first sales call sounds useful, that's the whole point of Scrapyard Fleet Mapping.