‘Atlanta Magnet Man’ uses bike rigged with giant magnet to remove 410 pounds of screws, nails and sharp metal off streets
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This cyclist nailed his flat tire problem.
A Georgia resident who’s dubbed himself “Atlanta Magnet Man” is using his bike and heavy-duty magnets to pick up hundreds of pounds of screws and other metal bits off roads after he grew fed up with the number of flat tires he kept getting.
Since he started his odd rescue mission a year ago, Alex Benigno has spent $1,000 on magnets to attach to a bike trailer he uses, Axios reported last month. He also uses a broom to help catch street debris.
“I just want to ride all over the city and pick up nails and screws wherever I find them,” Benigno told Fox 5 Atlanta earlier this month.
He initially saw a giant bag of screws on the ground of a parking lot one day. Hours later, the bag remained as no one else came to sweep it up, according to the station.
Benigno decided to take matters into his own hands and created an Instagram page to chronicle the heaps of sharp metal he’s collected with a growing fan base pointing out places in Atlanta that need him.
“Here are some of the nails and screws and friends I found terrorizing our tires around Atlanta,” he captioned in one video that showed him dumping metal bits into a box.
“I can sleep better knowing that at least some of my fellow citizens won’t have to change their tires on one of these cold nights,” he said in another post alongside a similar video.
Benigno has taken about 410 pounds of junk off the street — including a bullet and construction crane — which he recently gave to a local scrap metal artist, according to the Washington Post.
The street sweeping guardian is now looking to purchase a prototype bike lane sweeper that can pick up other items like glass, gravel “and other tire-popping debris,” that’s immune to magnets.
“This problem isn’t unique to Atlanta — it’s everywhere,” he told the Washington Post. “We’ve all known the aggravation of finding a nail in a tire. With all the problems in our lives, we don’t need to deal with that, too.”
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