NOTE – I am bringing this item around in spite of the fact that it never sells very well.  I know exactly why it never sells well, it is in many minds “expensive” but I have committed to always recommending the best cost to value ratio, well, this is it.  You can keep buying 12-14 dollar piece of shit trowels and replacing them every year or two.  Or you can buy this and never worry about a tool for this purpose ever again.  The choice is your’s to make.

Every day I bring you an item on Amazon that I personally use or has been purchased by many members of the audience and I have researched enough to recommend.

Today’s TSP Amazon Item of the day is the A.M. Leonard No-Blister Trowel.  This is another item where I am irked a bit to even need to do research and a review on.  You’d think something as basic as a small hand shovel would have endless good options.  This is not a hard thing to build, the basic design of them is hundreds if not thousands of years old.  Yet much like hose nozzles most are absolute total garbage.

I have thrown away tons of trowels over the years.  Three many problems are…

1. The handle becomes loose and it falls apart of becomes wobbly
2. The handle uses some shitty plastic or rubber that eventually breaks down into a sticky mess due to the environment or becomes brittle and cracks or gets goo all over your hands, usually combination of all these things.
3. The shovel itself is cheap and thin and eventually buckles, bends, etc.

Some have 2 of the three problems above.  When I thought about this, my first thought was why the hell are they not simply made of one single piece of metal?  I looked and found some made of both stainless and cast aluminum.  Then read reviews, all were CHEAP GARBAGE.  Thin gauged junk metal that eventually buckled or bent.  The photos of them were just sad.

I briefly considered some options by DeWit and I have to say they all look good, but you are back to metal going into a wooden handle.  If you want a good trowel from DeWit try this one.  For some reason my dogs seem to love the idea of eating wooden handles off garden tools.  It is also a point of failure waiting to happen. I was not able to verify if DeWit was full tang and for that reason thought yea, good tool but for something this simple can we do better.  I may in fact buy some other DeWit tools, I really think highly of them, but again for a trowel I was insistent on finding one that was a single piece of forged metal.

Again this is so frustrating when you are like look, I am not cheap if I must spend 50 fricken dollars for a damn hand trowel I will do it!  You feel like shouting, why is everything today made total garbage?  I mean I have even bought top end stuff from like Fiskars and Corona and they are all JUNK, sooner or later the handle materials turn into sticky messes or brittle crap.

Then I remembered A.M. Leonard, they make solid gear always.  Right away I found the A.M. Leonard No-Blister Trowel and was sold.  Thick cast aluminum and an extruded one piece handle cover.  Even if that cover breaks down, who cares the core tool is solid aluminum and thick enough you ain’t gonna be doing anything with a hand trowel to break or bend it.

In fact A.M. Leonard guarantees this tool for life.  I am not sure how it would fail anyway but here is a story for you about this tool.  I wish I could find where I read this review but one person said they had bought a new one since they lost their old one.  Still the same great tool but eventually they found the old one.  It was buried in a compost heap for over two years.  The metal was a bit pitted and the handle a bit faded but it was still just as good functionally.

So check out the A.M. Leonard No-Blister Trowel today.  They have made it exactly the same way since 1959 and unlike many makers since it works great they didn’t change it.

Remember you can always find all of our reviews at TspAz.com