On Fri, 28 Apr 2017 17:17:40 -0400, "Jim Wilkins"
wrote:

wrote in message
...
On Friday, Rudy Canoza impotently whined:
.....

Those who can , do. Those that can't , well no one cares about
them.

Last metal working was to silver solder box knife blade to a bit of
1/4 inch all thread to make a tool for cutting dandelion roots. I
drilled a hole in a golf ball and stuck the golf ball onto the all
thread to make a comfortable handle.

Dan

I got as far as saving a nice maple sapling for the handle and digging
through the steel rack for the rod, then decided this is a better
project to buy instead of build. Anything jabbed into the ground
here -will- hit a rock.

Maple will be nice for a push tool, but forget it for prying tools.
If you wrap a couple winds of baling wire at the bottom end (unless
you go with a socket) it will help for small amounts of prying. For
large socketed prying tools, you really want hickory or elm for the
strength and interlocking grain. Elm was ALWAYS used for wagon wheel
hubs and spokes for that very reason. The Eric Sloane books
(especially A Reverence for Wood) spoke a bit about that, but George
Sturt's The Wheelwright's Shop covered it in detail. All excellent
books, BTW.

We have about 30% river rock here, combined with nice, rich, fluffy,
heavily composted soil around here. I resorted to using a rubber
mallet when installing landscape fabric staples, and sometimes had to
move the thing half a dozen times to find 6" of rock-free soil. When I
was doing lots of fencing for a couple years, I invested in an HF post
auger. With the 6" bit, it would routinely bring up half a dozen
fist-sized river rocks with the 18-24" of dirt from each hole. That
was absolute hell with a clamshell digger, so the auger was dearly
loved from the first hole on. Besides, my arms couldn't take more
than a dozen clamshell-dug holes in a week. Shovels were easier, but
that post-hole digging is the pits.

--
Well, the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they
are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn’t so.
--Ronald Reagan