Camper's Hook

[bigfootnampa]

Great gifts for campers or RV ers!

I made a hook like this to clear the grass from the cement cracks in my patio... but my wife snagged it to help her pull down the roll-up awning on her horse trailer. She likes trail riding and camps with a group that shares cooking and a fire etcetera. She says that that hook has become a constantly used tool for all sorts of chores. They all pull their awnings down with it but also use it to tend the campfire rearranging the logs and setting pots of food or coffee on and off the coals. Even when she gets home now my wife will take it up to the house to tend the hearth fire (she prefers it to the fancy fire tools that sit right on the hearth). She also uses it to scoot logs into the log carrier so that her hands stay clean. It seems a simple tool but has MANY uses and is pretty enough to feel good when you work with it! My wife reports that all her fellow trail ride campers want one... so I am making them some and I thought that maybe some of the guys here at IFI might need a little holiday gift idea to work on. I start with 24" of 1/2" rebar and draw it out as I hammer the deformation texture out of it... ends up about 29" from the outer edge of the hook to the tang tip (I make a 4" tang) thus with a 10" handle I have about 35" OAL (this particular hook has an 8" handle but was 26" of rebar to begin with).

35 inches overall length with an 8 inch drawknife shaped handle, lightly finished. Hammered texture steel.

Camper's Hook

[jake pogrebinsky]

Right on,Clay,that looks like a very handy universal tool!
As we get ever younger,and bending over becomes ever more fun,something like this starts looking very appealing!
Good work,thanks.

[bigfootnampa]

Well I do appreciate that aspect of it too Jake. I intend to make a longer version for doing remodel demo work. I had one here just very light duty that I used to pull down some old spongy soffit on a customer's house. That can be such a NASTY job... pulling all that old dust and dirt down on your own head! Using a 5 foot version of this hook I was able to pull down a 40 foot long run of soffit without taking my ladder off the truck! I used it to pull down the old insulation too and then hooked it up off the ground into my garbage can without having to bend over! Had the whole thing done and cleaned up in an hour and a half! Maybe half an hour was doing the demo and the rest cleanup. Had I done it with a hammer from the ladder the clean up time alone (for ME not the job site) would have been longer than I did the whole thing in this way. I was able to stand back just enough to stay out of most of the flying dirt too! These kinds of jobs are so unsavory that hired labor won't hardly do it... but simple now!

[jake pogrebinsky]

That's exacly what i meant,yea,sounds very useful.

Great,and for some demo work you may even consider an extra-long one as well!

But,seriously,it's a good idea,the long reach.

I know it's not the same,but what's the stevedore's hook look like?(Never had the pleasure of doing that,though worked the docks in other ways).

[bigfootnampa]

The stevedore's hooks that I have seen pictures of were quite short... much like hay hooks. I have made hay hooks too but find they do not work well on the round bales we mostly get now... they weigh from 500 pounds to 1,200 pounds. Got to have forks and a bobcat for those!