6 The Best Backcountry Shovels

Hi, I’m mike seacoach here, I’m here to deuce potty trowel. These days we make three: we have the deuce number one which is six and a half inches tall. So it’s about the minimum depth for a proper poop hole and for a cat hole in the woods it weighs 45 ounces. So it’s incredibly light that’s about as much as this much water. Now we have the deuce number two, which is the evolution of our original deuce of spades, this one’s seven inches long and it weighs 0 6 ounces, which is about that much water.

And finally, we have the deuce number three, this one’s eight inches long. So you can. This is the depth of a full depth cat hole and it weighs 0 95 ounces, which is this much that seems kind of academic, so my favorite way to show people just how light these are. Is this? You can’t do that with your everyday poop, trowel, okay, obviously uh they’re, a sheet metal product, uh they’ve been bent into a curve for strength, and it goes you know thinnest.

So this is the lightest duty model for ultralight fanatics, only medium which is sort of the sweet spot for most backpackers, and then we have the heavy duty model which is made out of the thickest material and is the largest the basic strength idea behind. These is uh very much like something you all know when you have a piece of paper, you curve it and it gets quite a bit stronger. So that’s the basic sort of engineering principle behind these.

The other thing is, is they’re made out of high strength, aerospace grade, 7075, t6 aluminum, and it’s all it’s all: u s, aluminum, no matter where we make them. That turns out to be pretty important. We take for granted that we can get products that are really strong, 7075 t6 aluminum that passes ams 4045 is something anybody can get on the internet in the us, but other parts of the world. That is absolutely not the case, so here’s some of the stuff from ours- and you can see it- has it- has a lot of spring back.

So this is a high yield strength material. Now this is a sheet metal part that was came from china. It was also sold as 7075 t6, and I can tell you from experience that you can’t get 7075 t6 high strength t6 in china, unless you’re, a chinese aerospace manufacturer, there’s just no way you’re going to get it and sure enough. This is what this stuff does so very low yield strength. This is not a high strength, material, it’s being sold a 7075 t6, but it’s definitely not high strength, 7075 t6.

That has implications beyond just the strength. Our deuces are all tumbled, so they’re put into these gigantic bins filled with abrasive material chunks of it hundreds of pounds and they’re thrown in there, and then the whole thing is is agitated so that all of our edges are nice and smooth and round. This is not a sharp edged product. It’ll, never cut you. If you don’t have the high tensile strength the high yield strength on these, though, what happens? Is you just end up beating the heck out of the thing? So if you see a sheet metal product- and it’s obvious- it probably should have been tumbled, but you see in the comments on it that maybe it’s got sharp edges, there’s a good chance that the reason for that is because it can’t be tumbled.

It’s a low strength, material. Some of the other design features of the deuce are it has four little tiny teeth right on the very front of it, so that as you’re digging, you can cut small roots, you can nick them and then they can chop through with the rest of it. That was a nice little refinement we added a couple years ago, then, on this end it has a slightly wavy edge so that it increases the friction. So when you’re pushing on it, you don’t have to just rely on the little notch right here and then everything about the top is rounded so as you’re pushing you know, these are sheet metal, they’re not going to cut you, but there is a limit how much force you can use before they start to be uncomfortable.

As you push on it, you don’t have any hard edges that are trying to dig into you and last but not least, you notice that the handle is very short and very flared right here, and the reason for that is because, first of all, when you’re digging a poop hole, you know they’re they’re, not very big around. You can make poop holes with these, that are, that are like just four inches across, but eight inches deep. It’s it’s a really dramatic cylindrical hole you can make with these and having a short handle is very much a part of that.

If it’s a long handle it it bumps into the edge much more easily. The other thing is, it increases the strength dramatically, so we’re not so much worried about this strength. This way, it’s the strength. This way that we have to worry about, because all of these have the limitation of being the curved piece, so they’re strongest this way, not that way, the very top has also been flared so that when it’s in the dirt, you can pull it out more easily and there’s nothing special about this hole and whenever you have a piece of backpacking equipment, there’s always this interaction between the product and its features and how it’s made and the technique that’s used to make the most of it.

So the deuce actually has a really interesting and important feature. This thing has actually been designed to be used upside down, so you put it in your hand this way or like this, and you notice there’s about twice as much area along this edge than there is along this edge. So as you’re putting pressure on it, you actually are doubling the pressure into the ground, so you can dig and probe and bust up hard spots hard dirt, clods extremely well with this trowel used upside down and that’s uh, now very much a part of how the whole thing works.

When you do that, it really really ups the satisfaction of having one of these things. It really makes the thing so much nicer to use. We have a lifetime warranty on our deuce of spades. Does that mean you? You can’t break one, but if you do send us a picture and uh three dollars postage in the us and a brand new one’s on its way, we’ll even let you switch models if you want um, you know that’s something probably worth mentioning.

Is that uh, you know sometimes the ground. You know it’s just way too hard. There are places where you, you really shouldn’t, be trying to dig a poop hole, and sometimes you don’t find that out until later, but I mean uh I’ve run into ground. Where you need this, I mean there really is dirt. You’re, not gonna, go anywhere without a pickaxe and um. You know, by the same token, there’s rocks there. You’re not gonna, get you’re, not gonna, budge them without anything less than a crowbar, maybe even a pike.

So you have to be a little bit judicious about exactly what battle you want to fight making these poop holes um. You know and that’s in direct trade, for the super ultra lightness of these things. Um. Last but not least, we obviously we make them in lots and lots of colors. This doesn’t have to be a grudging pur. Just that where you know I got to build, you know, dig a poop hole. I need a trowel. These things are fun um.

It’s really more, like you know, picking out a lollipop, that’s that’s our philosophy. It’s all these different colors, just really cool piece of gear. Okay, um, let’s go dig some holes. You.

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The world 5x sleeve that holds a DIY trowel. This is made out of a piece of steel, roofing material 5v. This is just a piece of scrap that was laying next to the building. All I did was I just cut the rib section out right at the corner on each side, where it attached to the rest of it so I. Just that was looked to be about right, cut a template out of a file.

Folder made some notes. One radius was a Fancy Feast. Can the other radius was a 20-ounce Gatorade cap nice easy to find for most folks, the holes are 5/16 of an inch in diameter and they’re on 5/8 inch spacing I’ve got a if we can see it filed a little root saw and on one edge. Lastly, I took a piece of paracord pulled out the the center split it in half lengthwise and then I superglued it in place to protect my palm when I was digging and we’ll see.

If that stays on there, I may need to do something a little bit different, but that’s what it is for now, eight inches long. It’s almost two inches wide and it’s an inch deep. This way it’s just under 0, 9 ounces. It keeps flashing down to 0 85, occasionally with the Tyvek sleeve cool, 0, 95 ounces or 27 grams for the metric folks in the world.

Fun little project didn’t take too long, easily available product of materials and we’ll see how it tries out works out. Is it titanium? No, does it weigh more than titanium, not by very much will it rust yeah it can rust, but it is it very cheap, so hope you enjoyed it. Maybe you learned something make you one yourself.

You.

This is our d2 ext shovel. It’s meant to function really well as a hoe, but it can also be converted to a traditional shovel features, a lot of the same stuff as our other as our other avalanche shovels. It has. An overlay shaft on here allows us to use a little bit less metal without compromising strength, so we’re able to make it really light. It comes with our b2 blade, which is our middle sized blade. So there’s no neck sticking up and we actually weld that piece in there to actually add some strength to the shovel instead of just bending that metal around the shovel shaft and then again on the front, we have our nice relief pattern that adds a little bit of torsional rigidity to the shovel blade if you’re shoveling out there and some in some hard snow.

So right now, I’ve got this thing set up as a hub. Oh, if I wanted to switch this around and just use it as a traditional shovel, I just removed the blade just slide this piece down and there we go now. We’ve got your shovel ready to function in traditional mode. The handle on this thing is fully extendable too, so you can get good leverage, it’s not digging deeper snow so that fully extends it’s a real nice feature as well. I go back into the hoe, remove the blade slide your shovel handle down and put the blade on and there you go and that’s the d2 ext you.