I had a nice little gardening shovel in use for a long time. It must have been approximately as old as I am. But recently it got damaged beyond repair. Due to pandemic measures I can't just go to the next garden centre. At least I can do my weekly shopping at the super market and there I found this real cheap shovel costing 2 or 3 €. I thought I can't do anything wrong at that price. If it brings me through this gardening season everything is fine. It didn't even outlast half an hour of gardening before the weld points came of.

Normally I wouldn't have bothered to repair it, I'm not equipped for welding and since this shovel is coated I don't think it would have been easy to weld. But I just afforded a thread cutter kit. Not a cheap one but one supposed to work on steel with up to 800 N/mm² tensile strength. By now I had only used it to cut two threads in plastic so the shovel was suitable test object. And a solution with no nuts, where dirt could stick, seemed a good idea for a shovel.

Supplies

shovel to repair
2x washer M3
2x screw M3x8

Tools:

engineers file
centre punch
drills (2.5 mm and 3.2 mm)
countersink
wire cutter kit M3
power drill (with some power)

Step 1: Repairing the Gardening Shovel

To make sure, that the material of the shovel is not to hard for my tools, I scratched it a little with the engineering file. I could do so without a problem so I went on.

I drilled the holes in the shovel blade. Ideally I would have chosen a 3.2 mm drill (inner diameter of M3 washers) but I only had a 3.3 mm one (for core drill holes of M4 threads) so I went with this one. Then I drilled the core holes of the M3 thread into the handle. After a few minutes I was not even 2 mm into the 4 mm thick material and I had to consider, that the drill might not be as good, as I expected. I tried it out at the second drilling point and here I only got barely visible results. The brand new drill went dull right away.

Thankfully I had a 2.5 mm drill in my HSS kit and that went through the metal like nothing. Afterwards I chamfered all holes with the countersink.

Now I had to check, if the thread cutters of the kit are better than the drills. My kit allowed me to cut the M3 thread in three steps and since I worked on steel I didn't skip one. Cutting the threads worked great and now I could screw the blade to the handle. Since the 8 mm screws stuck out a little on the front side and washers are seldom a bad idea I decided to use two of those on the backside.

Step 2: What Did I Get Out of This Little Project?

a gardening shovel, which hopefully brings me through the gardening season (and ideally lasts a few years more)
the verification, that I can cut threads in steel with my kit
the insight, that I shouldn't drill holes into steel with the drills of the kit (annoying because I don't have a drill for each core drill size in my HSS drill bit kit)
a dull 2,5 mm drill

Was it worth it? Maybe not, if you consider that my employer pays way more for a hour of mine, than that shovel costed. But it is not all about money. It is also about doing things yourself, trying things out and not produce more waste than necessary. So yeah, I would do so again. Maybe I would use the better drill from the beginning to keep the worse one in better shape for plastic and aluminium. But I didn't know that and why should I bemoan the loss of a bad drill bit...