New hay rake tine cutter

I’ve been making wooden hay rakes for several years now. To make the rake teeth, called ‘tines’, a cleft ash billet is knocked through a sharpened steel tube called a tine cutter. As the wood is split from a larger log, the fibres run along the tine intact making each one very strong.

Recently I’ve been thinking about my rakes and that I would like to have a tine cutter to make slightly smaller  tines. While I was at Beamish Museum the other day, I mentioned this to Bill who was helping on another stall. The very next day he turned up and gave me a perfect new tine cutter which he’d made the evening before. The generosity of makers never fails to amaze me.