Stanley Super Wonder Bar field evaluation
I've worked with the Stanley
Wonder Bar before and
went to pick one up last week at the hardware store for an upcoming
demolition project.
They had a good selection of
what I call wrecking bars, but when I saw the ergonomic curve of this
new Stanley Super
Wonder Bar I knew the
decision process was over.
The "Super" improved curve will cost you an
extra 4 dollars over the regular Wonder Bar, but after only 2 short sessions
with it I'm prepared to proclaim it worthy of that special adjective
usually reserved for comic book heros.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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We have these in the shop. Due to the curves you almost always have a place to wrap your hands around or to apply pressure. But they're kinda small. As Archimedes said "Give me a place to stand on, and I will move the Earth" (if your lever is big enough).
For serious lifting I still prefer a scissor jack or a hydraulic bottle jack, especially since they can keep the load up without me applying effort. And with a 4 ton bottle jack going for $17 it doesn't break the bank either. Of course most cars will have a scissor jack in the toolkit. I imagine you could get them relatively cheap at a car scrapyard as well.
We've got several jacks, and they do come in very handy around here. However, for demolition, it's often just too much trouble to set up a jack if a pry bar will do the trick.
When Mark went out to try this tool, he told me "We should charge people to do this for us!" as he grinned ear to ear.
We also have a larger crow bar, but it's pretty heavy unless you need that extra leverage.
My dad years ago had worked out something similar with a regular wonderbar using a small piece of pipe bolted through the nail pull hole. Gave that extra leverage that a wonderbar is lacking.
The other thing he does is sharpen the end so it's quite sharp.