Slippery Tool Handle? What Firefighters Wrap It In
A smooth shovel or hammer handle turns in a wet or gloved hand. Fire crews fix it with a roll from the hockey aisle, and know where to stop the wrap.
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An old shovel handle gets smoother every year. Hands polish it, the sun dries it, and on the first wet morning of autumn it turns in your grip while the blade stays in the ground.
Fire crews meet the same handle on a pike pole, the long hooked pole they pull ceilings down with, and they have a cheap fix. When someone in r/Firefighting asked what small, cheap thing makes all the difference at work, the reply that drew the most follow-ups was hockey tape on the tools.
If you dig, hammer or pry in gloves or in the rain, the fix is a roll of cloth hockey tape, the kind sold for the butt end of a stick. The firefighters say where to wrap it and where not to, which matters on anything you swing.
What firefighters wrap a pike pole in
The firefighter who gave the answer wraps the end and the middle of the pole, the way a player tapes the butt end of a stick. That, they say, makes the tool easier to grip when they're working.
The person who'd asked, a Texan, admitted they didn't know how to wrap a hockey stick. Quick and easy, came the reply, and one roll does a whole truck's worth of tools.
Another firefighter in the thread uses it on an axe.
The tape is cloth with a tacky glue, a cotton and polyester weave. Yoav Liberman, a woodworker writing at Popular Woodworking, wraps mallet handles with it to thicken them, and gets a very secure grip. The glue isn't a permanent one, so it comes off when you want it to.
How to wrap it, and where to stop
Between the firefighters, the woodworker and a SlashGear guide, the method comes to this:
- Wrap where your hands go. On a long tool that's the end and the middle, as the pike-pole firefighter does. Keep adding turns until it feels right. The woodworker says you can change the shape of any handle to fit your hand this way, and suggests a few extra turns in the middle for a football shape.
- Run something under it for ridges. One crew runs a shoelace under the tape, which they say makes pike poles much easier to use. Or spin a length of tape into a rope and wind that on first, which the pike-pole firefighter reckons might be easier than working a lace in. The SlashGear guide describes the same twisted cord, covered with more tape and squeezed tight. Two other crews run medical tubing under it, nebulizer tube at one station and tubing off old oxygen masks at another. The shoelace is the one you've already got.
- Stop well short of the head on anything you swing. A firefighter who's taped axes says don't go too far up the handle, because the tape gets in the way of sliding your hand down as you swing. On an axe, a sledge or a maul, your top hand starts near the head and slides down to meet the other as the tool comes round. Tape there catches it.
- Rewrap when it wears. The woodworker peels it off and replaces it as needed, and the SlashGear guide says the same.
Why not electrical tape?
It's the roll most of us already have, but the builders who weighed in rule it out.
A 2009 thread on the Fine Homebuilding forum began with someone asking about wrapping electrical tape below a hammer's head to protect the handle. One reply said to use hockey tape, or old-fashioned friction tape if you can still find it, and not electrical tape. Another put it shorter:
Electrical tape is sliker than snot!
MRockwell, in the Fine Homebuilding forum
The same builder keeps several wraps of friction tape, the old black cloth kind, on a framing hammer so it fits the hand.
Does it hold up wet?
Ice climbers tape their tool handles too, and a Mountain Project thread on it is where the answers split.
One climber who's always used hockey grip tape says it's grippy and stays put even when wet. Another isn't a fan, because it goes slippery once it saturates and freezes. A third calls it really good if you can keep your tools dry.
The crew with the shoelace trick says it helps most with wet or frozen gloves. The woodworker believes the cotton blend takes up some sweat as well.
For a shovel in the rain, go ahead. For a handle that's going to freeze solid, the tape's not a promise.
What else people wrap with
Hockey tape is the answer that turns up in every thread, though it isn't the only one. When someone in r/Tools with a bunch of fiberglass digging tools asked how to add grip to them, the top reply was hockey tape, "sticking to the stick for decades". The asker reckoned that was the way they'd go.
Other replies offered scraps of weather-seal flex tape, old bike inner tubes slid on with soapy water, and plasti-dip.
The SlashGear guide lands on the same sort of list, hockey tape first, then rubber dip and foam tubing. On Garage Journal, a thread about hammer handles leaned to the tape over plastic dip, with one member pointing out it's less messy and needs no drying time.
Start with the tool you hold in the rain. One roll of the white cloth tape does the shovel, the hammer and the pry bar with most of it left over, and the axe gets the short version.
