Budget Bonsai Brigade

[pandacular]

I’ve seen a number of ingenious tool solutions here, in the club, and even a few in my own garage. Bonsai can be expensive, and one of the best places to save can be by improvising or inventing tools. If you get good enough and have specific enough problems, it might not just be cheaper, but more effective—Kimura is famous for his tool inventions.

I’ve been wanting to start a thread sharing ideas on this topic for a while, but was spurned to finally get around to it by @yenling83 ’s Black Pondo Podcast episode with Julian Tsai about budget. Let’s make this a thread where we share some of our creations, tips, and ideas.

 

[pandacular]

I’ll start us: a lot of old timers in my club as well as the museum have beautiful pot aprons that they use when working on trees to make cleanup easier. I wanted one! But I’d rather use something I already have. I use t shirts for cleaning and shoe shining (another bonus budget tip) and since I stopped wearing t shirts much, I get packs of men’s 3XL since they’re the same price as the other sizes. By cutting one of these shirts in half and then cutting open the collar, I was able to get basically the same kind of apron , but without the waxy coating.

Not half bad for 5 minutes of work—the cut is sloppy and the white is blinding, but I can fix both of those now that I’ve validated the prototype.

 

[Attmos]

Wish I was more experienced... this is my kind of thing. Looking forward to seeing this post develop.