One Last Repair

It probably won't shock you to learn that I broke a shovel while digging out during the last snowstorm we had about a week and a half ago. I've mentioned this numerous times during this blog's existence, but I have found that many things are not built up to Rakauskas-grade and thus my family has a long traditions of things snapping off in our hands and then breaking even worse when we try to fix it using large fingers in small spaces. That is why a long time ago I began weighing all my repair decision against the time it would take to fix the item, how much it cost in the first place, along with how much a brand-new one would be and just how pressing my need for the item was. Because the foot-plus of snow we got just a few days ago is already gone I was confident the snow was over for the year. Therefore, I was perfectly content to leave this shovel to the side and let it either slowly disintegrate over time or fix it whenever I got around to it in the fall in anticipation of next winter. Of course Mother Nature wan't going to let me get away with this, because we're getting one more (hopefully final) fresh coating of snow this evening and into tomorrow.

Because I am not one of those idiots you see on the news who acts genuinely shocked every time it snows in New England during the winter months, I have more than one shovel. The problem is that I don't have many shovels which don't also have a metal edge on them. And while the metal edge comes in handy when you want to get under the ice layer and down to bare asphalt, it is not the shovel you want to use when it is time to clear the snow off the roof of your car. Because the snapped shovel was both wide and metal-free, it was quite good when it came time to clean off the cars. At first I thought about simply buying a replacement, but the stores today were quite crazy. Apparently a lot of people were suckered like I was during the last storm when we were told to expect around 7 inches of snow and woke up to find well over twice that much on our driveways and were determined not to let that happen again. I know there was a run on milk this afternoon, so I can only imagine how quickly the few remaining shovels (most hardware stores have already made the switch over to spring tools, so at least everyone should get a sweet deal on mostly-dead plants this weekend) were being gobbled up.

That is why this afternoon I found myself performing surgery on a shovel. You see, the wooden handle had snapped down at the bottom, near the shovel itself. This meant I still had roughly 90% the handle to work with. I figured it was going to be a fairly simple process in which I would take the one screw holding the two pieces out, let the end of the broken handle still in the end of the shovel fall out, smear a little glue on the end of the piece I had to use, put it back together and be done with the entire thing in 5 minutes (which is good, because 5 minutes was how long I wanted to spend on this project). The fact the screw came out so easily should have been my first guess that this was going to be harder than I expected, because the odds of one small screw holding this entire thing together for a number years was remote at best. (I do appreciate that despite all the advances in science, the shovel has remained largely untouched. Humanity got that one right on the first draft.) Clearly there were other forces at work That other force turned out to be some industrial strength adhesive which should make it's patent holder proud. I don't know if it was just glue or they sealed the end of the handle in the molded piece of plastic at the factor, but if these two pieces were going to come apart it was going to take a lot of work.

At first I thought it may just be an issue of needing to get it started and not having the angle to do so, so I tried to be very clever by drilling a screw into the wood and then pulling on that screw. All that showed me was how hard it is to firmly clamp a curved shovel in a straight work table clamp as I nearly hit myself in the face a few times. Next I tried sliding a screwdriver in between the wood and the plastic in an attempt to break the adhesive seal, but after a couple minutes I became convinced this was simply going to crack the plastic in half, which would have rendered the entire experiment a lost cause. What I ended up doing was taking the largest drill bit I could find and drilling several holes close to one other, to essentially hollow out that part of the wood. Only then would my screwdriver technique do any good and even with the improved technique it was still very slow going. I only got about three or four inches of the shortened handle into the shovel instead of the six inches I was going for before I got fed up and said enough was enough. I think it will work, but I am not what you would call supremely confident. I would say hopefully we just won't get that much snow, but the history of this particular season is not on my side. Either way, my fingers are crossed this is the last time I have to worry about it for a few months because I am ready to start working on repairing all the rakes I will be breaking shortly.