Digging a trench for laying pipes in the ground with an ordinary bayonet shovel is not very rational. The trench turns out to be too wide, the volume of excavation work increases, unnecessary physical effort is wasted, etc. If you make a special shovel, which is called a trench or drainage shovel, the process is much easier.
Will need
Materials and tools:
- 3 pipes with a diameter of 90 mm, 34 mm and 16 mm;
- hammer paint;
- metal ruler;
- chalk for marking;
- grinder with various attachments;
- bench vice;
- welding machine.
The process of making a trench or drainage shovel from old pipes
To make a trench shovel, special precision is not required, so we will make the markings by eye. The most important thing is that there is no weld inside the blade. For ease of work, we will make a slight narrowing from the top to the bottom of the shovel.
We sharpen the end of the shovel to make it easier to dig into the ground and cut the roots found in the soil. Using a grinder, we cut out the contours of the blade and the tip of the shovel along the marked lines.Using a grinding wheel, we align the cut lines and sharpen the shovel from the inside. Using a grinding disc, remove old rust and dirt from the surface of the pipe blanks.
We cut out a support for the leg from a pipe with a diameter of 16 mm. We also cut off the handle for the shovel and prepare our parts for welding. First, we connect them with tacks, then, making sure that everything turned out correctly, we finally weld them.
We cut the end of the cutting at a slope, pass it under the leg support and rest the cut part against the surface of the shovel blade and weld it securely.
We clean the welds, prepare the surfaces of the shovel for painting and paint it with metal paint, such as hammer paint.
Digging with such a shovel is not at all difficult, quite easy, but the process turns out to be a little slow. In about 1 hour you can dig a trench about 35 meters long, which is not bad for manual work. We lay a plastic pipe in the trench and cover it with earth.
For a person of average build and height, the optimal dimensions of a shovel would be the following: bayonet length 46 cm, foot rest 24 cm wide, handle length 95 cm, handle 15 cm wide. As a result, the total length of the shovel was 130 cm.
The design of the shovel turned out to be quite successful, but it is better to use thin-walled pipes to make the tool lighter. The shovel can be slightly modernized if 2 knives are welded to the bottom of the footrest, which will cut the lawn and, thereby, make the work easier and more accurate.
