thanks for the sugestion for mulch fork handle

I puy the mulch fork handle back on with gorrilla glue,,it did a great job,,wet it first it kind of swells up,,,it was a great sugestion and worked well,,,,,thanks

Glad it worked, Larry--I was wondering how you'd made out with that. Just made a couple of hoes for a cousin's kids for them to help their parents in the garden--old combine knife pieces for the blades, welded to scrap pieces of water pipe for the sockets, and a dollar-store broom replacement handle cut in two for handles. Used Gorilla Glue to put the handles on, plus drilled a hole through the socket and handle and put in a nail for good measure. Got ear-to-ear grins when I passed them off, and they can't wait to use them outside--finally getting warm enough here in NY to actually SEE the ground, but it will be another month before we dare put anything in it.

I made replacement wood handles for loppers (pruning shears). They had rectangular shanks about 1/4 inch by 5/8 inch. Drilled 5/8 hole and filled with Bondo auto body filler. Inserted shank into Bondo filled hole and used old ferrule Still works great.

Glad it worked, Larry. The pitchfork handle I put on with G G is still working fine after 2-3 years.

KEH

TimV-great tip, tightened up a couple of "wiggly" fork and shovel handles already, will be doing others A/R. So far, so good, thanks!

No problem--trying another of the same tonight. Hand rakes in general live a hard life around here as I've got 3 acres to do, with half of it "lawn" (a term VERY loosely applied to the area where the weeds and brush are small enough to mow....) and the other half wooded with lots of cherry, pine, and other trees that love to drop leaves, branches, and sundry other things that need picking up. Most of the new rakes aren't worth taking home, so I'm making one of my own, patterned after a Council Tool fire rake. Got buckets full of old mower sections, bed frames for the angle iron, lots of old water pipe for the handle socket, and I'll put a broken-off handle of some variation on with Gorilla Glue and a nail through it. I always enjoy putting old tools back in service or making new ones from reclaimed parts built the way I want them, not the way some beancounter says is the cheapest way to make it. Picture is from Zorro, I believe--the first one that came handy, but mine should be similar, without the nice paint job. In general, I've found Gorilla Glue to be an excellent fixer within its limitations, the largest one being it doesn't hold up well to repeated impacts, so using it, even as half of a belt-and-suspenders approach with wedges, on things like axes and hammers doesn't work well over the long term. In general, if such tools are loose, the only proper method is to remove the wedges, drive out the handle, re-shape or replace as necessary, and re-wedge them--there may be adhesives out there that will do the job, but I have yet to find one, and I've tried dozens. Short-term "lazy man's" methods such as driving a nail in or soaking the head, are ineffective at best and downright dangerous at worst--over time, they make things worse instead of better by splitting, drying, rotting, and otherwise degrading the wood, and if you care for your tools and anyone within the range of the head's trajectory, you'll avoid using them. It's usually not quite as much of an issue with most lifting or pulling tools (shovels, forks, rakes, etc.) but of course they should also be periodically inspected and fixed if loose.

My version of a fire rake. Construction details outlined above. All scrap stuff--the handle is a chunk of 2" pine I got at the local dollar store. It's a touch over 4 feet long, and probably should be another 6" or so, but it works pretty well considering the total investment and the fact that it's what I had lying around. First job was to scatter out the snowbank I used as a photo backdrop--still got a foot or more in shady spots or where the snowplow pushed up banks, but even that's rapidly going down as we've strung together a few warm days with some April showers thrown in. Next job was to strain out some large chunks of flotsam that got into my drainage ditch. Had a terrible time with flooding last year, including washing out several tons of fill from under my garage and depositing it into my cellar, so I've been very nervous about how this year would go, considering we had even more snow than last year. So far, all the work I did to improve my drainage seems to have helped, though we've also had a better Spring than we did last year, at least from a flooding perspective. A few warm days followed by some less warm have slowly melted the snowpack, instead of a rapid thaw like last year that caused the flooding.
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