How To Make Gardening Tools At Home: Handheld Dibber

Friday, May 24, 2019

How To Make Gardening Tools At Home: Handheld Dibber


Description

Interested in how to make gardening tools at home? Need a seedling planter for your garden? Want to make a simple DIY project for your gardening enthusiast? In this episode in the House of Hacks series' on DIY gardening tools, Harley shows how to make a handheld dibber, also known as a dibbler. Springtime is upon us and making homemade gardening tools can be an easy workshop project for either yourself or a loved one. The dibber is an especially easy-to-make DIY tool to help plant seeds and seedlings that requires minimal tools and time and is particularly suited for kids and beginners. These simple tools make great gifts for the gardener in your life.

Previous video gardening tool video: How to make a long dibber

Inspired by this Charles Dowding video and this blog article.

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For a written transcript, go to How To Make Gardening Tools at Home: Handheld dibber

Music under Creative Commons License By Attribution 3.0 by Kevin MacLeod at http://incompetech.com.
Intro/Exit: "Hot Swing"
Incidental: "Chipper"

Transcript

Are you looking for an easy to use gardening tool to plant seedlings?

Do you need a simple to make gift idea for the gardener in your life?

In today's episode of how to make gardening tools at home, we're going to make this handheld dibber.

With spring in full bloom, DIY gardening tools are a popular project for either your own use or to give as gift ideas.

In an earlier House of Hacks episode, I showed you how to make a long dibber out of a rake handle.

A long dibber is useful when planting seeds and seedlings in large beds at ground level.

This handheld dibber is useful in smaller areas, such as raised beds.

Before making the long dibber, I cut off about 12 inches from the end of the handle in order to make this smaller handheld dibber.

Conceptually the idea is the same.

We're going to be putting a rounded point on the end to make holes in the soil for seeds and seedlings but we're going to be adding a few extra features to this one.

In this project I'm going to use a lathe, just to show a different way of doing the same thing, but if you don't have access to a lathe, you could do the same thing as I showed before with a sanding station, or by hand with sandpaper, files or a rasp.

Today, I'll also be connecting two round objects to each other at 90 degree angles.

Stick around to see how I do that.

Welcome! If we're just meeting, I'm Harley and this is the House of Hacks where we make stuff out of wood, metal, electronics and other similar materials in order to inspire you on your creative journey.

For this project, to start, I'm going to cut off about 4 inches from the end of this wood.

I'll set it aside and use it later on this project.

Then I chuck the remainder in the lathe and start cutting it down.

The idea is to reform the end from the slight taper to more of a point with a rounded end.

Once I have it to the shape I want, I'll use the marks on the tool rest to inscribe a couple lines an inch apart.

These allow the user to gauge the depth of the hole they're making.

The last lathe operation is a bit of sanding to make everything smooth.

Remember that 4 inch cut-off from earlier?

That's going to be a handle for this piece.

I used the sanding station to put a slight chamfer on each end.

So now that I've taken the dibber out of the lathe, the next operation is to attach the handle.

Originally, I was going to use a hole saw and put a radius on this end for this to sit down inside.

But I don't have a hole saw the right size for this radius and so the next idea I came up with was to use a Forstner bit to put a flat on here and a dowel to join these two together like so.

Overall I think this is going to be a much easier operation.

All that's left is a bit of oil to protect the wood.

It's ready for use.

I'll see you over here in this video where I show you how to make the longer version of this tool for use standing up.

And when making things, remember...

Perfection's not required.

Fun is!