Switched from trowels to dental picks for cleaning small artifacts after a dig in Montana last fall.

I used to just brush and scrape everything with a trowel, but after I spent three days chipping away at a broken pottery shard from a 3-foot test pit, my supervisor handed me a dental pick from her kit and said 'try this instead' so now I carry a whole set for fragile stuff has anyone else made the switch tooling wise?

3 comments

3 Comments

vera51425d ago

Pretty sure dental picks are mostly for detail work, not really for replacing trowels entirely on heavy stuff. You'd snap the tips off fast on anything that isn't already crumbling.

clairen8525d ago

Picked up a cheap set of dental picks at a flea market years ago for a brick repointing job on my old house. The mortar was super hard and brittle, and I was worried about cracking the bricks with a hammer and chisel. Used the picks to scratch out the loose stuff around the edges first, then a narrow trowel for the deep bits. Snapped two tips before I learned you gotta go slow and let the tool do the work, not force it. Worked a treat for getting into tight joints without making a mess, but I wouldn't trust them for fresh, hard mortar.

eric_knight725d ago

Yeah picking the right tool for the job is key, @clairen85 nailed it about letting the tool do the work. I keep a trowel for the heavy digging and only break out the picks once I'm down to the fragile bits.