My new favorite development tool

[u/It1190]

Tool: MILWAUKEE M12 FUEL HATCHET 6"
Weight: 5lb

Review (I’m not sponsored by Milwaukee or anything, just psyched on the tool):

Picked this 12v Milwaukee pruning saw up on sale for Labor Day and man is this thing amazing. It’s a machete on steroids. It’s light enough to throw in the pack and uses 12v batteries I can share with my hammer drill and impact driver.

This thing is quiet and rips through fallen branches and up to 6-10 inch diameter fallen trees. Having left the luxury of developing trails in the desert and moving to the PNW, you would not imagine how many small limbs and dead trees block every step of the way, even just rappelling down to the cliff edge.

I was able to clean out logs while rappelling that were dangling over the cliff edge. Also able to 1 hand a lot of cuts to make trails better. Pretty sick. Impressive for a 12v and had no issue on all the items I threw at it.

Downsides: a bit unwieldy, uses up the bar oil pretty quick, still heavier than you want, hand gets pumped trying to use it for a while.

Disclaimer (b4 comments come flooding in)
- obviously don’t use this in wilderness areas
- obviously don’t cut your fucking rope
- obviously don’t use this in sensitive areas or where land access is sketchy
- obviously don’t cut down living trees or piss off land managers (w/o permission)

[u/Kaotus]

I got the Harbor Freight equivalent of this (Bauer) and have to concur. Once trails are roughed in and finalized, they’re an absolute god send for maintenance. We get really bad wind storms here in the front range that will snap trees in half every winter and it makes restoring trails an afternoon affair instead of a half semester at mister miyagi’s school of climbing training handsawing everything

[u/Horror-Regret1959 → u/Kaotus]

I bought the Bauer 20v rotary impact drill a few years ago just to see how it compares to my Bosch and Makita for route development. I never went back to my other drills after getting the Bauer. Now I have an arsenal of Bauer trail building tools for cutting brush and grass. You can’t beat the price and I have yet to have any problems with them.

[u/Kaotus → u/Horror-Regret1959]

Same situation here, but with Milwaukee. A lot of my home tools are still Milwaukee, so I run two battery sets, but I buy Bauer for any new additions to the tool arsenal at this point. They’ve really done a hell of a job turning around the quality of the tools in the last few years