I do volunteer trail maintenance for the local mountain bike trails, which mostly consists of mowing and running a string trimmer and hedge trimmer every month or so. In between mowing sessions, the vines and blackberries here tend to reach into the trail - we call them face slappers. As I was riding today, I had a vague memory of a sort of implement that I thought would be effective at whacking the odd vine back in between mowing sessions.
The item I was thinking of was a flexible tapered plastic rod, triangular in cross section, with a bit of a hollow grind on the faces to make the corners sharper. The handle end had a lanyard and the whole thing was perhaps three or four feet long, thumb sized at the butt, and maybe 3/16" at the tip. You’d use it to slash at herbaceous weeds, and the speed of the tip and the sharpish edge would cut or break the weeds off.
So did I hallucinate this brush clearer/cattle prod/torture device, or does something like this actually exist with a name I can Google? I like the idea of it because carrying a machete or other metal blade while biking seems like a bad idea, and this would give me the reach that hand loppers don’t have. Quick stop, slash slash slash, ride on.
The thing I’m thinking of isn’t a sling blade or grass whip, with a wooden handle and serrated angled blade at the end. It’s a one piece implement that’s bendy, more like a plastic epee.
Mangetout’s probably on the money with the sjambok (ugh), although I was picturing something made of white PTFE or HDPE instead of hippo hide, and not round in cross section. I’ll take a look at the farm supply near here to see if any of the stock whips fit the bill.
I bought one of these thingies (this exact thingy) to tame the weeds in this old garden bed I was letting grow over. IIRC it worked ok, and it’s sharp as heck, but it seemed to only work on really sturdy weeds on the ground.
I actually dug the thing out a few weeks ago to see if it could handle the grass growing around my mailbox post without me having to get the trimmer out, and it did not handle said grass at all. It’s still perfectly sharp. The grass was just not substantial enough to let the blade bite it. Seems like the blade would just push it over. In the end I basically just combed my grass and took out like 1/6 of the blades. The rest remained.
I don’t think this tool would work for vines growing at face level. The vines wouldn’t be able to push back. Like trying to chop lettuce with a knife, but the lettuce is sitting on a hammock.
@brossa definitely needs something that doesn’t need resistance in order to chop. Something that provides its own resistance. Like a whip or a very sharp thin blade.
To be fair, I don’t need to sever the vines completely; just cracking them so they droop and don’t extend horizontally into the trail is sufficient. But I’d like to do that 2 feet or more from the trail, and not spend five seconds at each vine stopping, reaching, grabbing, pulling, snipping, and discarding.
Most sjamboks nowadays are made of black plastic, but they definitely are round and don’t have sharp edges. Whatever you’re thinking of, it isn’t a sjambok.
What you describe sounds like this thing - a plastic martial arts training sword, although the one in the link has a square cross-section rather triangular.
You can find metal ones by Googling things like “kung fu sword mace” or “Chinese steel whip mace”. You will find a bunch of other wacky fantasy martial arts weapons, too.
I wonder if the Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi (“Grass-Cutting Sword”) got it’s name due to a literal ability to cut grass, or because it can mow down the emperor’s enemies…
