The Armour Archive

Where might one buy a cheapish stake holder/ how would one make one?

halberds sells them for his tools

I have been using a large vice with modified jaws.
The stake bottoms out on the bench.
It lists or tiltes a bit in use.
Ideally auxiliary jaws could be fabricated to provent this.
Much like Clangs rivet sets. But with the cross member welded to the jaws.

If you have access to a welder, some steel plate its fairly easy
This one is a little over engineered
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=180257
Anvilfire has common tapers for some common stakes.
If you already have the stake reverse enginearing will ensure proper fit.

A hardy may also work with standard square stock.

This is what I cobbled together for myself. Along with a couple ball stakes.

For my smaller stakes I use a leg vice; for larger stakes (either 2-3" shafts or ones that are just heavy in the business end, like a 5" ball stake) I have a couple large wooden stumps (well, more like short sections of log set on end, but we tend to call them stumps) with sockets carved into them.

My Pexto stakes fit into a wood 'horse' made from layered 2x10. While the pieces are separate it's easier to trace the taper and cut half of a pyramid shape. Then you bolt it together. I've seen many robust tool holders on rickety tables and I don't think that helps. If you can you either want a lot of mass or solid contact all the way to a lot of mass.

http://i161.photobucket.com/albums/t239 ... 010544.jpg

Sean Powell's "heavy horse" is a good one for using a wood saw/circular saw, preferably the circular saw, and ordinary wood drill bits -- easy to organize.

A fitting like Keegan's square tube on a plate can come in many forms, like mounting that tube onto a length of steel pipe and a plate on the floor, making a stake station that's completely independent of everything else, and is simple and quick to make with a welding torch.

The simplest kind is to drill a big enough hole down into the top of a stump, either with a big auger and get it all done in one pass, or several stabs at it with a 3/8" or larger drill bit that is also long enough. With the hole roughed out big enough to start, finish it by pounding the stake's shaft into it to give its final form. A tapered stake shaft works best for this as you only have to figure out how to pull it up a little bit somehow to get it loose again and put another stake in the hole. This is where a holder like Keegan's is very good, it has a setscrew or can be shimmed in with a thin wedge with a turned-over top to it to hammer the wedge in tight enough and then to tap under the turnover to get it loose again -- if you can't drill and tap threads, see if you can tighten with a wedge or shim.

Into a hardy hole of an anvil, best to have a stop-collar welded onto the shaft so it doesn't keep trying to get deeper and deeper in the hardy hole. With a tapered shaft sliding in deeper and tighter under hammer strokes, you can wedge the heel right off an anvil that way. It's happened. Hardy tools should have a stop. Since hardy holes go all the way through an anvil heel, it is easy to tap a hardy tool that's a little bit stuck from beneath and get it out.

Stakeholder plates, Pexto style with multiple openings and some swage grooves included, are outside your budget, and hard to find. They bolt to a heavy bench or that stake horse.

You now see they needn't be fancy, nor necessarily large in themselves, and can fit every circumstance and every budget.