#trail tool

[trailgnomes]

Bart the trail tool

We made this tool because we needed something midway between a mattock and a rake, for the hard ground and rooty crap we regularly deal with maintaining our trails. It is inspired by tools like Mattock, McLeod and other digging/clearing tools.

It’s very effective at cutting through small roots, nettles etc to keep trails neat with little effort. It also does a great job of the light digging needed when making a fresh piece of trail, especially where it’s been overgrown.

The front cutting edge is angled just right to allow both cutting (like a mattock) and scraping (like a sharp rake). The rear edge is vicious rake teeth which are idea for heavy reshaping of trail surface.

The handle should be at least as tall as the user for the best control over the angle of the blade when chopping through undergrowth and earth.

We have found our local hawthorn/blackthorn bushes actually make very good handles, despite the pain required to get one.

[trailgnomes]

Replacing broken tool handle

Our “Bart” trail tool is a great digging/scraping/raking tool for building trails. You can probably see the reason behind the nickname.

After a year of heavily using this bart prototype, the handle was looking old and dodgy and suddenly snapped off when I was chopping through some bramble roots.

Removing such a well stuck in piece of wood looks difficult but needn’t be hard to do. We didn’t have tools to do this at the trail, though, so we brought it back to base.

I cut off the end to be flat, if the snap is below the top of the tube this might not be possible, instead cutting flat with a sharp chisel might help. This makes it easy to position and start drilling.

Then I drilled several 10mm holes with a cordless drill, trying to remove the wood as close to the edge of the tube as possible to make it easy to pull out.

After several holes were drilled the remaining wood pulled out with a gentle tug with pliers.

I sharpened the cutting edge with an angle grinder and a few quick passes.

After wire brushing, a coat of metal paint makes it as good as new.

Now we need to find a new handle. :)