If they think you’re crude, go technical; if they think you’re technical, go crude. I’m a very technical boy. So I decided to get as crude as possible. These days, thought, you have to be pretty technical before you can even aspire to crudeness.
William Gibson — Johnny Mnemonic
Now that the trees have shed most of their leaves / needles, it’s time to get the accumulation off the roof edges. Fortunately, the upstairs windows overlook the biggest piles and, after I considered and rapidly rejected the notion of using the wind stick, Mary convinced me a roof rake would suffice by deploying a too-short broom.
After considering and rejecting several decreasingly elaborate variations of 3D-printed pole-to-pusher-plate adapter nonsense that almost involved our pole saw, this happened:
The wood pole comes from a left-behind assortment atop the garage’s open ceiling joists and the pusher plate comes from the cardboard box treasure trove.
A laser cutter makes close-fitting rings and hot-melt glue sticks those plates together with gleeful abandon:
The blue-and-white cardboard plate consists of two box flaps glued together, the glued-up stack of half a dozen rings transfers the torque from the plate to the pole, and the whole affair took the better part of fifteen minutes from idea to cool-enough glue.
It’s back on the garage joists for next year, unless we decide that pole has a higher purpose in life. Worst case, it loses two inches of length.
Bonus: Chore accomplished before the predicted weekend snowfall!
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 
Comments
4 responses to “Roof Rake”
Notes a reminder to get the aluminum roof rake and poles from storage. I redid the front gutters last year, and put on stainless mesh leaf screens. They’d work better with hardwood leaves than our pine needles, but they are Good Enough(tm) to do the job.
We had multiple inches of snow yesterday (about twice what NOAA said we would, surprising nobody except them), and rain this morning. I don’t think I need to remove snow, not today, but soon.
The gutters here have a convoluted shield that’s supposed to direct rain around the curve into the gutter while encouraging leaves over the edge. It’s not clear how well it works, but at least the gutters don’t have the huge clogs of matted leaves I got used to blowing out in years gone by.
I am so not walking around on the roof any more.
I feel like you missed a perfectly good opportunity to make a roof robot.
Which would be very technical indeed.
Well played, Sir!