Leaf rake stainless steel wire

This rake comes from the Dutch tool manufacturer Sneeboer. There, stainless steel wire just a few millimetres thick is cold-drawn into very fine, thin tines. Extremely flexible and at the same time extremely stable, these filigree tines follow every movement of the tool head. The entire tool weighs no more than 800 g, so that the tedious work of sweeping leaves in the garden in the fall is transformed into a pleasure to use, even over longer periods of time.

For more than 100 years, the family of the West Frisian blacksmith Jaap Sneeboer has been supplying their Dutch fellow citizens, known to be incessantly engaged in farming, dyking and horticulture, with the tools they need to do so. At Sneeboer, they use two different types of stainless steel for their traditional Frisian horticultural tools: a tougher one (with higher degrees of alloying) for the springs and grommets holding the handle and low-alloy steel that responds better to forging for the functional parts in the narrow sense. They weld the individual construction elements together, then ground and polish them by hand.

It has long become common practice to stamp and roll garden tools. However, we hardly need to describe the difference; we want to point out that forging is the only way to deal with a tool in all its details and strengthen the material in those parts where this is necessary for functional reasons.