Grubby Grubbing

A friend mentioned to me a few weeks ago that his sister has a tool she absolutely loves. It was a Wilkinson Sword weed grubber. This brand is seen in the US in razor blades, and probably has been for other cutting tools in the past, but the garden tools aren’t that widely found as far as I can tell.

Here is a stainless version of the tool. Call me lazy, I’ll push a plane and saw for several hours in the shop, but I don’t like getting on my knees to garden and would put this thing on the end of a long handle. Gardening on knees and leaning over literally will give me a migraine. I don’t know if being unable to tolerate that kind of thing is lucky or unlucky.

But, it’s not for me. There’s also a carbon steel version of this thing and it’s probably all of about $15 US equivalent. I couldn’t find it on alibaba but other similarly priced tools from WS can be found there for about $2 each. The trick is you need to be willing to buy 20 of them. This is the nature of what we buy in the US. In lumber terms, we often hear something like “it’s 10 cents on the dollar at the stump” or at the mill.

Here’s the problem with the tool – the whole $1-$2 item branded and shipped and retailed is just the way things are now. That’s not so much the issue as consumers ultimately dictate what we get. The problem is that it looks like it’s blanked (many inexpensive plane irons are, too, and double edge razor blades definitely are), and that favors using a thin piece of steel and then stamping or manipulating the blank. My friend says his sister loves this tool, but it breaks at the handle.

He asked if I could make something similar – who knows. I hammer shape flat stuff, but it was worth a try.

I decided I’d use CruForge V and heat treat it a little under so that it’s still fileable. You do this with simple steels by heating them to nonmagnetic and no more and not getting too brisk in the quench. They get some stiffness and strength after temper, but can be filed, and you’re not gambling with tempering embrittlement like you would be doing if you just temper to 500F or so. Embrittlement occurs when it takes less energy to break something at a lower level of hardness than it does higher. It’s pointless territory. I also have no need for CruForgeV as I likely bought it some Tuesday lunch at work grasping for straws regarding a 1% steel with some vanadium, but not too much. Great in this case would be 0.3%, but it has 0.75%. I didn’t believe it could possibly lead to stray vanadium carbides of any size, but it actually does. They’re sparse and not that small – I really don’t know what the point of the steel was and maybe I’d need a power hammer to figure it out. Needless to say, it’s no longer made and you can still get old stock from retailers years later.

Translation – no big deal if someone breaks it and I have to find something a little tougher. it is tougher than something like O1 or 1095, though, and especially vs. something like a PM steel of any significant carbide volume. All of those types are intolerant of bending and prying.

Well, here’s what I came up with.

It’s 1/4 bar stock heated, flattened on the business end, hammered to the S shape and then hammered and ground at the tang.

Rather than trying to seat the handle by friction on a tool that gets pushed and pulled, and will perhaps live outside, I just epoxied it in with a very healthy amount of epoxy, and the bolster is glued on, and then also bound by the epoxy spillover. If it comes out, it can just be reglued.

I would guess CruForgeV steel is water hardening and underheating it plus just dropping it in the quench rather than moving it means it’s not fully hardened, and beyond that, it’s less hard in the middle. That should give it some forgiveness. Who knows how this would be handled industrially. I don’t.

Now, here’s my point about this tool – it could be made like this in China for $3, I would bet. Maybe the handle would just be something ashy looking with a cheap varnish dip, but that’s functional. It cost me probably $15 in materials to make it, so if it doesn’t outlast the original for some reason other than the tang, it’s just a fun project.

The handle is london plane tree, and it’s varnished with copal, and the business end of the tool is Japanned. If I won’t spring for stainless, it is probably good form to at least protect the steel and wood from rust until it’s confirmed that it’ll be used often enough to keep the rust abraded off on a regular basis.

The varnish isn’t neat, it’s just padded on and little bits of paper towel and other nonlevel stuff is left – there’d be no virtue to a slick-handled garden tool, even though it’s much more fun to really tart handles up.

The japanning is a full varnish, cooked and linked together like a true varnish so that it can’t settle in the jar, and all that it needs is either a long long time of air exposure to dry, or more smartly, the cure catalyzed by being baked. Which is what I did. Plane tree is sort of a boring wood – it’s one of the Acer woods (like hard maple) or it’s half of that and some kind of hybrid. It’s like a weird feeling hard maple, but the varnish did a great job of bringing out figure when there’s not too much there. Something natural resin varnishes do a little better than shellac or hydrocarbon or synthetic polymer finishes.

Like many favors – i hope once this thing is gone, I never hear about it again. That’ll be good enough – it will mean someone is happy enough with it and didn’t break it. It should be difficult to break it in the first place, but I’ve got no clue what people do in gardens. There are always rocks and roots in dirt, and not having the right tool in hand to deal with such things really doesn’t stop most folks and it never really stopped me.

The point of this thing as it is, I gather, is to go straight in, grab the stem of the plant below the dirt and tear it up or pull it out…..something I’d much rather do standing.

It’s all part of making. I’m just a tinkering amateur, not a pro by any means. it’s still much more stimulating to think about how to make something like this and experience it than it is to incessantly read various catalogues and try to be an expert on what can be bought.