Tuesday, September 26, 2017

An Installation Tool For Staked Garden Fixtures -- Or -- An Earth Poker


I recently built a tomato trellis for my son's garden. Here's a view of it.


I got the plan for the trellis from a book, Classic Garden Structures by Jan & Michael Gertly.
 
Note the 12" long rebar stakes attached to the bottoms of the legs. Those weren't in the book's plan. I added them to improve the trellis' anchoring. Here are closer views of one of the stakes.




It dawned on me that installation of the trellis might be a bit problematic -- shoving the trellis' four stakes into the ground simultaneously didn't strike me as an approach that was likely to work. So, I made a poker tool to help prepare holes to accept the stakes. Here's a view of that right next to a stake.


The handle is a 4 1/2" length of 1 3/8" diameter hardwood dowel. The shank is a 15" length of 1/2" diameter steel rod, salvaged from an ancient Qume daisy wheel printer. Here are some closer views of the tool.






The rivet through the handle is a 3" common nail. I seated the shank into the handle with five-minute epoxy, since the shank turned out to be a little bit loose in the hole that I'd bored for it. I turned a 60° pointy end on the shank in the metal lathe.

So there we are. I expect that the trellis will still be an awkward thing to install, even with the aid of this tool. We'll see how it goes.

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