#2 Steel Finger

This one's name says everything. Modern packing techniques had led to piles of sand too hard for my unaided fingertips to dig so I needed replacements. I made a set of ceramic fingertips but those didn't work.

Steel is hard and can be sharpened when it wears out. I had primitive tool-making tools so made the original version as simply as possible: screwing the steel to a roughly carved piece of pine taken from one of my original form stakes. As you can see there were problems. The steel projected too far without support, and bent back.

So I rebuilt the tool. The clamp-together handle was intended to make the blade stiff enough for carving both on a pull stroke and a push stroke. It worked, but wound up being too heavy.

I started over from scratch. By this time I had better tools and my skills had improved, so I really tried to make this tool perfect. It comes fairly close. It's lightweight and maneuverable, but sand tends to pack in under the blade, and the blade impinges on the sand at an angle that's too close to horizontal. This needs more research.

In succeeding tools, I've steepened the angle of the blade and shortened the handle. These tools (new Steel Pinky and Steel Thumb) seem to work better but they are too new yet to tell. The practical result is that I still carry the #2B with me and use it for situations where the newer tool won't do the job.