The New Hotness

I used the long-handled bypass lopper to harvest the 3D printed soaker hose splices and clamps, which made the sad state of the lopper’s bumper painfully obvious:

Contrary to what you might think, those rivets never had a head on this side and the bumper seems to be held in place by an interference fit with the plastic handle cover.

A bit of cutoff wheel work removed the crimped end on the 5 mm stud holding the bumper to the pot-metal dingus:

Whacking it with a punch separated all the parts:

The gray thing is a silicone rubber vibration isolator that’s a bit too large in all dimensions, but surely Close Enough™ for present purposes.

A length of 5 mm shaft became the new stud, with M3×0.5 threads tapped into both ends and a pair of random screws held in place with red Loctite:

There are no pix of the drilling and threading, as it was accomplished after a shiny-new 2.7 mm “titanium” metric drill from a not-dirt-cheap set shattered in the shaft:

The blue color on the flutes is Sharpie to remind me it’s defunct. I completed the mission using a #36 drill with no further excitement.

The dingus is now held to the lopper with JB Weld and, should that fail, I’ll drill-n-tap the rivets and be done with it.