Do aliens exist? How did life first originate on earth? These kinds of questions may keep others up at night, but not me. No, I was lying in bed on the weekend, wondering why nobody sells crowbars with foot pegs to jump on like a pogo stick! I mean, spades and shovels have them, as do broadforks, for aerating soil, so why not crowbars? I brought this up with a friend over morning coffees and he suggested there's likely more force from driving it by hand than by applying body weight. I suppose it's also an awkward/dangerous way to use the heavy crowbar, which could do some damage if banging into your face.

So, I decided to try a basic version of an idea I was toying with to use the crowbar as a giant slide hammer. A more elaborate version would be a big metal  sleeve over the bar,  a pulley and a rope to get maximum impact. For today, though, I used what I had available, in a post driver. I dug two sections side by side - one with my normal hand driving of the crowbar and another, where I'd place the bar end down, then lift the post driver over and bang it down. Both had advantages. The manual driving allows for more angles and quickly chipping away at multiple locations, but unable to drive through really hard ground. The post driver method worked well when the ground was hard enough to get a few inches of the bar tip embedded in the ground and pull back on the bar, using leverage to break up a decent area.

It depends...

In conclusion, I'll use each method, depending on the ground type. Today, once I got through a bit of a hard crust, the ground softened up again, so hand driving was better. I'll use the post driver for sure again when encountering hard or blocky ground, where penetration and leverage will be handy. Also, after a while, picking up the post driver with one arm and lifting it over the crowbar started to get a lot heavier, but that's just me needing to lift more weights in this outside dirt gym!