Bending the prongs of a garden fork

Sep 16, 2008 7 Replies

I've managed to bend two of the prongs on the garden fork and can't find a way to bend them back. It's hard getting sufficient leverage without finding another unexpectedly buried brick to push against.



Can anyone suggest a way to bend them back? Unfortunately I don't have a large steel vice attached to a heavy hardwood workbench bolted to the floor.


How big a blow torch do you have? It will bend reasonably easy if red hot.

Run over te fork with acra, and leave it parked on teh handle, and then get a scaffgold tube and slip it over the tines that need restoring. Sweat grunt and impress the wife with your manliness, and so on.

The best way, other than heating it, is to use a steel tube held in a vice, and to insert each bent prong in turn and pull on the handle in an appropriate direction.

If you don't have a vice, you could hold a tube firmly on the ground by parking your car with one wheel sitting on it. It will be easier if you drive onto the pavement and clamp the pipe close to the kerb - so that the handle can start from below the horizontal IYSWIM.

Couple of big G clamps clamped to somthing solid.

Or get a vice. Everyone needs a vice.

I wouldn't try heating it. For the typical sorts of garden implement steel you don't need to (first time anyway) and you're likely to start burning the handle. Different story if it's removable easily though.

Reminds me of going into an opticians in France once to see if I could get a replacement screw for my dark glasses - can't remember now which way round it is but one is 'un vis' and the other is 'une vis', and I got it the wrong way round. Gave them something to laugh about. I'm sure that's a good source of puns in French.

Rob

Thanks for the suggestions, chaps. Will give it a go.

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