~613 grams of wood an' steel; the shaft is a ~5/8" chamfered octagonal; the blade is ~1/4" thick, an' is not welded to the shaft, but tenoned into a rectangular mortise. then peened over to secure it. That joint is slightly loose, resulting in slop that amounts to ~1/8" at the tip of the blade. The lack of a welded joint there suggests a reasoned choice favoring the mortise & tenon...a more time-costly method...but that's conjecture; I don't know why. The wooden grip is oval, ~1 1/4" by ~1 3/8", 6" long, with a heavy iron ferrule 1 3/4" long. I believe this tool was made to remove the inner portion of the top of a ~55 gallon oil drum...or probably lots of them; there were literally millions of those as surplus, post-WWII. It could have been started with a ~1/4 hole drilled or punched just inside the lip. The blade is sharpened both sides; that, an' the notch at the shaft tip, would have allowed right or left hand operation. I'll guess those tops were ~12 gauge steel (~0.105"); to use this thing all day would have been a real job of work. There is quite a bit of wear at the corner where the blade edge meets the tenon, suggesting considerable usage of this tool. I'll be glad to hear your thoughts, comments an' suggestions. Thanks for lookin'! EDIT: Google says most of those drum tops were 18 gauge, ~1.2mm thick.
i'd rather use one of them then the turn handle ones ( what and effing nightmare they were..............auf wiedersehen....goodbye) turn turn turn bobble.. ......turn turn bobble aw well its tomato soup it'll just pour out through the gaps.............................taken its time though ........for fk sake now i wonder how many times that happened.......even in a day
I still use a hand-cranked can opener. Works like a charm. it's a clamp and crank though, not a stabby-stabby up-down up-down.
I've got a modern cranker, the horizontal-cut kind...I like it, an' the clean results. I also have the battery-powered teardrop, which cuts horizontally...it wiggles like a dog passin' a peach-pit, an always seems about to quit before it's finished, but doesn't.
No batteries here. We had an electric one when I was a kid, but it died and was never replaced. The electric one was the cat-caller; catfood cans had no pull tabs and the sound meant "breakfast" in Cat.
I still have a bunch of kitchen implements with the green wooden handle (can opener, jar opener, egg beater, etc) that were my grandmother's and I'm 76. They still work like a charm. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. No worries if the power goes out.
