I shouldn’t have read the thread from the bottom up… I though people were talking about a flashlight called the Scythe. 
Fingers crossed that Mem delivers and everyone is happy forever!
I like them French fried potaters.
We call that bar cutter “whistlin’ Jack”….There’s times I wish I had one in my tool shed for a quick down and dirty on a small patch of invading weed. Mind you, I say small…and thusly small amount of time in the hand. 
Normally I pull it from small patches and use a how for in between settled plants
Do not have a sickle, ought to get one for our mistletoe harvesting (use plain simple pruning scissors now but a sickle would definitely be much cooler to use 
)
A Scythe flashlight hmm it is a renowned brand in PC cooling.
Oh, today is Thursday. Shipped!
Sigh……mmm taters
Bout time!
Can we get back on topic please?
How about some shovel comparison now that the long whistling jacks and scythes have been discussed 
Hey OP now we are of course anxious for a little review of that MEM monster
Any mattock discussion? I call a mattock the device with a 3” broad blade on one end, a 2” vertical blade on the other, used for breaking up rock and tree roots when digging a trench or the like. It’s a brutal tool to use, I guarantee!
We can use one of these to dig jaws out of the dirt when these lights of MEM’s start wreaking havoc on the darkness…
I’ve seen that, but the most common “mattock” I’ve encountered had a “pick” on one end.
This one is referred to as a cutter as it cuts roots with the vertical blade.
Either way, not fun to operate on an all day basis much less a week at a time.
I remember digging beam ditches for a house in Holland, TX that was an old homestead location. The ground had flint rock, bricks, tree roots, man it was the worst thing I’ve ever had to do in building a house! An 8 hour day would net about 12’ of foundation beam. Agony! And it was August, surrounded by trees and the old barn, no air flow to speak of. When you stopped for a breather and lean on the handle of the mattock, sweat would run off the elbows like a faucet.
I see all these people throwing money on a gym membership, to get in shape. Buy a cheap mattock and put a sprinkler system in your yard, you’ll get in shape!
I’m really glad to see how they design the handles on these kinds of tools these days. They don’t fit my hands, so I don’t have to use em anymore. hahahahaha
Georgia boy checking in. I don’t own one and haven’t used one since I was a much younger guy but our mattocks always had a pick on one end too. Fantastic tool when you need one, but I’m glad I don’t need one
I concur!
The kind I described above had the pick in place of the vertical ax, but still had the horizontal blade. I’ve operated it a good bit while doing electrical work. We have this clay/rock/whatever that is yellow/gray/etc. that is really hard to dig. The shovel doesn’t want to go through it. The flat blade of the mattock will shear it a little at a time. When you encounter a particularly dry part, you can break it up with the pick side. But, usually, it is malleable enough that the pick will get stuck in it instead. We were digging a ditch with a back-hoe and hit a hard patch of this stuff that we couldn’t get the claw to go down into at all. So, we grabbed a couple mattocks and wacked it out in the high sun of a hot summer day.
Pretty sure the pick end is used to break harder or larger rocks while the blade is used for excavation. The vertical blade cuts roots, depends on what/where you’re digging I guess.
So yeah, when people ask me if a particular flashlight build is hard I always think in terms of perspectives… any flashlight build is better than digging ditches!
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Yeah I think so too
Have one a tad smaller
And one with just the digging part
I Lt was from our late neighbor who had a thick metal pipe welded to it, I love using it and dig around rocks since we need rocks for a dam anyway
You got any biscuits for sale in there?
Yep…biscuits with mustard.
I might have to watch the movie after work tonight.