Thread: I am a money grubbing ...

wow, that picture after conversion and snipping really came out like 2002 quality in terms of resolution clarity.

That's a good looking tool. I suppose I'm curious about how your friend breaks them... Probably prying roots. Would be interesting to watch her use them to get some perspective.

I was sort of thinking the tool would be around 1/4" thick spring tempered steel.

Typically, we end up scraping all the varnish off lawn tool handles. I suppose it's not as flashy, but unvarnished handles don't rub hot spots on your hands. I also don't varnish my chisel handles for the same reason. If they need preservative... Torch applied tar is classic.

I would guess the person who breaks these is probably prying with them, but I think that's how they're used. Shoved in toward a root and then pried up. The wilkinson sword tool is bent sharply, or at least prior versions were, out of a thin tang into the handle. the stock is somewhere around 0.1" or less, and the picture above shows the tang folded and stuffed into the handle.

This one was 1/4" stock to start, so the bent area is pretty close to that, just cleaned up belt grinding after bending. the listings for the other say that they're heat treated, but who knows what that means -i'm sure they're hardened or as thin as they are, they'd just fold over.

re: the handle. We've learned with this varnish cooking so far that if you don't sand natural varnishes, they get sort of a micro-pebbly surface. I'm intending to leave that in place both so as to not get that sticky blistery rubbing, but also to get a better grip with gloves. I've followed what nicholson says (i think it was nicholson) in brushing three coats of the varnish at a time - it's thinned - and then sanding every third and continuing on and that will get you a guitar gloss like finish, but without that, the finish will never lay out like the gooey boat varnishes do. It ends up being an asset on handles. the only question then is how thick should it be - I won't make it so thick that I think it will last a lifetime of dirt contact.

i'd love to have given it a try in dirt, but I just have a few things on my plate that I want to keep moving and didn't want to get into a week long 100 weed fart around that would result in making yet another one to improve it.

We had the style of this when I was a kid that just had a flatter V on the front with a rod. I think the intention of that type of tool wasn't to lift the plant but rather just to push it through the plant stem below the ground to starve the root. The myth that all weeds will live forever if you don't pull every bit of them out lived on strong locally where I grew up.

I use something in wider areas now that I've seen called a winged weeder. Love it - jut a horizontal knife like tool that skims the weeds off at the ground and you're done with a large area in minutes. One or two rounds with it and the weeds run out of food.

I carry something similar on my ride-on mower, to get at the scotch thistles & other deep-rooted weeds that keep finding their way onto the property. So far, I haven't broken one prying out resisting plants, but a couple have fallen off the mower without my noticing. If I don't spot it & the blades find it on the next round, that doesn't do them any good at all....

Cheers

ahh...ian, you sparked my memory. The tool I'm thinking of was referred to as a thistle puller. it was like a snake tongue but sharp in the middle.

A thistle puller is an entirely different thing than this, what we were talking about was a "dandelion weeder", but I guess we didn't have a real thistle puller so we didn't know. it worked unless you believed the nonsense that you were using it incorrectly if you cut the dandelion off vs. faffing around trying to pull the root out of the ground.

Thistles were a big problem back then, too. I have no idea where they went!

https://i.imgur.com/jqp7jPD.jpg

well, I thought that was a better picture - it looked good at phone size! the phone thought the mess on the wall was the point, though and not the handle.

This copal varnish has drying agents in it, but it's a little light on them. So it'll be ready for a coat each day - a great finishing routine for the lazy. Planetree is like maple but I got this wood at hearne - not a great place to buy wood, but there were two billets eons and eons ago that I thought I might get some moulding planes out of. it works, saws and so on almost identically to hard maple here. My point about hearne is I don't know if this was a selected piece of wood and thus the curl or if the varnish is more responsible for starting to highlight some curl. Varnish is just about magic making something boring look good. The flip side of that is that if you have really high figure or especially something that could blotch, you have to pad a very light coat of varnish on first and let it dry completely to prevent later coats from getting into the wood.

2-4-D is what happened to broad leaf lawn weeds.

Pulling weeds is the worst thing you can do if you want less weeds.

The main advantage of chemical products is that you don't disturb the soil and stimulate germination of 10,000 years worth of weed seeds. Chopping off weeds at ground level works well for most weeds that don't regrow from the roots.

https://i.imgur.com/mOLtSfN.mp4

that is the effect on the handle that I'm mentioning. Once the varnish has a little bit of build, it will get a little better, but it's very subtle - I guess it's curl, but it seems to be in all of the plane tree whereas in maple, most of the time that you see a wrinkle, it's not part of an organized effort. when it is, the wood is pulled and selected and sold as figured.

Very subtle in this case. The varnish is good at bringing it out.

hearne is a place where if you're not buying rack wood, and there's anything special at all, you leave and you think "why did I pay $15 a board foot for that?" there's nothing really sensibly priced there in the little oddball wood. the owner is a nice guy, and interesting, but I've stopped going there because I always leave with something like this - wood that gets used in a handle 13 years later.

Originally Posted by truckjohn

2-4-D is what happened to broad leaf lawn weeds..

Many of the weeds I've got shrug off the phenoxy-acetics like 2-4 D and the broad-spectrums which do kill them also kill the grass, so it's a case of dig 'em out or have them take over. Using a 'lifter' like the one above gets most of the tap-root; they rarely come back, & besides, it's a relief to get off the damn mower for a minute...

John's comment got me thinking the same thing, though I did consider it when I asked that question - are thistles something that's really destroyed by 2-4D? what we seem to have around here is plants that look like elephant ears, clover that's hearty against 2-4D and creeping charlie or ground ivy. The ground ivy is persistent and has to be sprayed - every stolon can become a mother plant and you can't get rid of it - and if the neighbor has it, it can cross the lawn to the other neighbor's in a year.

but that's probably the answer - we're left mostly with stuff that's resistant to 2-4D, and each time it's not killed by it, it gets even better at it.

I mix a chemical that's brand named Triclopyr with 2-4D here to kill clover and ground ivy. The two are synergistic and I don't have to use that much.

I had to state that I'm over 18 to watch your video. The algorithm thinks it's erotic. Lol.

Originally Posted by raffo

I had to state that I'm over 18 to watch your video. The algorithm thinks it's erotic. Lol.

The figure is stimulating, but it's not quite as stimulating as imgur thinks it is!

Yeah, I thought the warning hilarious!

Warning.png

Hearne Hardwoods…yeah, I fell into that trap too on my one and only visit. (It’s a little far to make that a habit)

I still have blocks of cocobolo that are going to be plane infills, and some other tiger-looking knife scale blanks that are waiting for my muse to return.

There is a specialty wood dealer near me who specialises in selling exotic stuff. Thankfully they sell exactly the wrong quantities for anything I have in mind. (Way too big or just not quite big enough)