Finally realized my trowel angle was all wrong after 12 years

Been digging test pits near Santa Fe for a long time and always blamed my wrist for sloppy walls. Last week a volunteer, a retiree who worked on some big sites in the 70s, just watched me for a minute and asked why I was scraping instead of slicing. He showed me his grip, almost flat to the surface, and my next pit was clean as a whistle. How do you hold your trowel, and did anyone else learn basics way later than they want to admit?

2 comments

2 Comments

morganmartinez26d ago

The slicing bit is the whole game. I had the same wake up call years ago, a guy on my crew finally told me to stop pushing the trowel like a shovel and let the edge do the work. Once you get that wrist almost flat and pull back instead of forward, the walls just fall into place. I still catch myself reverting to the old scrape when I'm tired, but it's like riding a bike now.

brooke_jones26d ago

Flat wrist is everything, @morganmartinez nailed it.