I made these from defective microchips and adhesive magnets.

A friend once gave me a handful of some unusual defective microchips from the company that he worked at. These chips were found defective at the “final test” stage where the chip had already been packaged.

These chips were somewhat unique as they still had the lead-frame on them due to the very high (for the time – 1993 or so from the datecode) pincount. In the photos, you can see an extra plastic ring surrounding the 302 un-cut pins. By themselves, these chips look pretty cool, but I thought that there had to be a better use for them than simply chucking them in the trash.

Then, I noticed a huge roll of adhesive-backed flexible magnets that I had sitting in my basement. Ahh! I could use the large chips, a bit of the magnet, and make a unique refridgerator magnet! I simply cut the flexible magnet with some scissors so that it was the same size as the back of the chip, removed the waxy paper over the adhesive, and stuck them on. Super easy! Something like these pre-cut magnets would have worked nicely, but I had the large roll from a previous job, so that did the trick.

The finished magnets work very well due to the relatively large surface area of the magnet (which you can see relative to the postcards) but are also very convenient because the leadframe ring sticks-up about 1/8 of an inch from the refridgerator giving you a nice grasp on the magnet to remove it. Overall, these magnets are the ones I use the most to hang stuff on the fridge and I only wish I had another pile of those defective computer chips to make more.