The hose attached to this garden sprayer had failed last season, but the hose fitting had become one with the sprayer. Soaking it with penetrating oil for far longer than seemed necessary didn’t help, so I tried brute force:
After convincing myself that wasn’t going to work, I cut the fitting off and tried the old standby of collapsing the threaded shell inward with a small punch:
That didn’t work, either: the shell really had become one with the sprayer.
As it turned out, the plastic sprayer body had begun to crack in several high-stress locations and would shortly become Yet Another Project. I cut my losses and tossed the hose and the sprayer.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 
Comments
8 responses to “Garden Sprayer: End of Life”
I wonder if soaking it in vinegar would have helped?
That’s definitely a help for the deposits inside the kitchen faucet spout (which appear despite our water softener), so it couldn’t hurt. From what I could tell, the penetrating oil hadn’t made it past the first turn of the thread and the corrosion was absolutely solid in there. I think the sprayer might have been aluminum inside the plastic shell…
We salvaged the hose and sprayer from the Vassar Farms trash heap (some slobs ignore the pack-in / pack-out rule) a couple of years ago, so it was a zero-dollar tool that didn’t generate much emotional attachment.
What’s the pack-in/pack-out rule? Also, I saw a cute picture on the web of a hose sprayer, with the plastic shell clearly stamped “Made in USA”, but when separated, the aluminum inner casing read “Made in China”.
Vassar’s not in the trash disposal business and there are no trash cans anywhere: you’re supposed to haul out everything you bring in. A few gardeners either haven’t read the rules (which get mailed to you when you sign up) or figure the rules don’t apply to them. Sort of like the dog walkers who can’t imagine a gardener wouldn’t want a pile of dog shit right outside her garden gates and take offense when she reminds them to pick up after their pooch.
Maybe that’s pronounced “assembled from totally imported parts in a factory within driving distance of the southern US border”, like so many other things. [sigh]
I was happy to run across my old brass Nelson sprayer. (It got filed with garden stuff when we moved in ’03, but gardening/yard work is a lot different between sea level and 4300 feet.) The Nelson is now on the fire trailer hose, which gets the tools That Have To Work Right. Haven’t seen an all brass in a while, though the plastic ones can be (sometimes) pretty reliable, or at least maintainable.
We have a collection of those cylindrical brass nozzles that generally work fine, but Mary wants something with a wider spray pattern.
Leaving a brass nozzle lying around in public these days might provoke musings on scrap metal prices…
Salable scrap in public wouldn’t generate a second thought up here, unfortunately. However, the fire trailer is behind a locked gate and the local attitudes discourage jumping one. The discouragement can be pretty emphatic, if not ballistic.
Unfortunately, the gardens are all soft targets: most of the time, nobody’s around. [sigh]