Abandoned pegs? Sam Coles can help
Pitching up, the last thing you want to be doing is struggling to remove the previous occupants’ abandoned pegs. Sam Coles has the solution
THERE HAVE BEEN any number of times when I’ve arrived at a pitch, only to be confronted by awning pegs still in the ground, left there by previous occupants. Having hammered in their pegs, they find that they can’t get them out when they are ready to depart, so they just give up and leave them behind. The pegs are invariably in the way for the next occupants of the pitch, and the main option has been to hammer them right into the ground until they are flush. However, I have also been forced to abandon pegs that have locked themselves solid in the ground and won’t come out, for love nor money. So, what to do? The main culprits here are the widely used (because they are good and work well) 25cm nail-style pegs that have a plastic collar on top. These are made from hardened steel, and are the only type that perform well in hard ground conditions – the bent-wire type just curl up and die. There are commercially available tentpeg pullers, but they only seem to cater for the curly wire or plastic variety of peg. The nail type are not catered for (or if they are, I have yet to find one). With that in mind, this project details what I consider to be a practical solution to the problem. This tent-peg puller is of robust design (bordering on being overengineered, for which I make no apologies!) and will help you to extract a nail-style peg with ease, irrespective of the type of ground that it’s been hammered into. This tool also has three fulcrum points, allowing it to deal with pegs that put up a fight until the last inch. Although it has been designed mainly for extracting nail-style pegs, it could be adapted for use with other pegs by profiling the lever end accordingly, or by having multiple levers if an assortment of different pegs is being used.
Materials
0.5m of 20mm x 20mm x 2.5mm wall thickness box-section mild steel
1m of 25mm x 25mm x 3mm mild steel mangle section
Three M8 x 55 steel bolts
Nine M8 steel nuts
Two M6 x 12 steel bolts
Two M6 nuts
Two M4 x 6 cap-head screws
One 22mm bicycle handgrip
Spray primer and matte-black paint
Tools
Hacksaw
Square with 45-degree facility
Marker pen Cordless drill and metal bits
Centre punch
Hammer
Two mole-style grips
Round and flat files
M4 tap and tap wrench
Two 13mm spanners
Two 10mm spanners
3mm AF hex key
Thread lock
Masking tape
Skills
Basic metalwork
Time
Three hours
Cost
Approximately £20
What I learnt
How to craft metal and tap threads.