Must be one of those mf rakes!
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Must be one of those mf rakes! (underchin rakes?) #IYKYK Hey guys if your rake snaps, that's it you're done raking! #FollowMeForMoreCopingTips
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Riley S. Faelanreplied to otheorange_tag last edited by
@otheorange_tag No you aren't. You can replace the handle. It's just a long stick; it comes off the rake's head, and you can attach a new stick.
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otheorange_tagreplied to Riley S. Faelan last edited by
@riley dangit! wife probably already on that
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Riley S. Faelanreplied to otheorange_tag last edited by
@otheorange_tag Of the common agricultural implements, only the scythe has a somewhat complicated handle, in that it's not held by the long stick itself, but two crossing handlebars attached to it, preferably at just the right spots.
It might be useful to attach a cross-bar to the end of spade's handle-stick, but it's mostly optional. This is useful if you want to be able to use the spade to get into (moderately) hard or (slightly) frozen ground by applying your weight onto it — but this is nowadays a mostly obsolete technique. (Also, modern spade-heads often have a special ridge to allow standing on them, for the same purpose. A cross-end handlebar can make this slightly more convenient, but is still largely optional.) If you really need to get into a hard ground, there's tractor-pulled ploughs and harrows, or if you need to dig a hole into a hard ground, there's pick-axes and tractor-attached excavators.
Pretty much all of the other common agricultural tools typically just have long sticks for handles. In modern versions, they may be fancy sticks — such as telescoping sticks for specialised tools for getting fruits off a tall tree — but, basically, a stick is useful for most things that a farmer might want to do, if there's no machine to do it.
Which is to say, if you're going to do this sort of thing a lot, you might want to get a couple of spare handle-sticks. They do break sometimes.
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Riley S. Faelanreplied to Riley S. Faelan last edited by
@otheorange_tag For completeness' sake, the hand-flail's handle attachment is a bit special, because it has to be able to absorb forces pulling in particularly unusual directions. But the flail was such a bad tool that even some Amische farmers have given up on it in favour of just using threshing machines. Outside the Amische farms, hand-flails mostly only survive in the form of the nunchaku, which in the modern world have somewhat dfferent design constraints than the agricultural flails used to have.
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otheorange_tagreplied to Riley S. Faelan last edited by
@riley I was actually thinking about using a scythe except it's on hilly ground over gravel and I'd chop a foot off
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Riley S. Faelanreplied to otheorange_tag last edited by
@otheorange_tag I think a part of why scythe uses this unusual arrangement is, it makes it safer to use. The cross-handle positions establish a minimal radius for the scythe in the grass from the user, and lower the risk of scything yourself in the foot.
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Riley S. Faelanreplied to Riley S. Faelan last edited by
@otheorange_tag FWIW, moderate hills aren't a big problem for scythe, as long as the ground is largely flat and there aren't big rocks around (which could dull or break the blade). Some people have varying personal preferences about the direction they like to cut the grass on a hillside, though. For me, scything facing either downwards, or so that the high ground is on one's right side (assuming a right-handed scythe) make the most sense, but I have known people with different preferences.
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Riley S. Faelanreplied to Riley S. Faelan last edited by
@otheorange_tag FWIW, the logic of threshing machines isn't particularly hard; only the energy can be a bit of an issue. I'm still a bit weirded out, though, that the first production threshing machines appeared only with steam engine, and not with the rise of vertical watermills, centuries earlier.