Asphalt roof stripping tool makes excellent weeding tool

This tool is meant to strip asphalt roofing and to pull the nails out as you go.

I tried it on large weeds that have grown up between brick pavers and it's excellent. It not only pulls them clean, it moves them along so that they are easy to pile. It's a super robust tool that few people are strong enough to break. They are readily available at roofing supply stores. I've done this before with a flat shovel and it tended to push things to the side more and to catch on the edges of bricks.

It took less than 5 minutes to generate this big pile of weeds. It seems to work on relatively small ones as well, but I'm not sure how well it would work on soft ground. I only tried it over the hard surface.

Giving the groom a "stripper" for their wedding is a perennial gag in our family. It's cool to know there's more uses for it than just a gag gift!

Generally when I hand a roof stripping tool to a new employee, I say you've always wanted to be a stripper, unfortunately this is as far as you've made it.

There's a big commercial building where I deal with weeds that grow between the asphalt and block wall. It was last done more than 2 months ago, so some dandelions were almost at the point of going to seed. I used this tool along about 200 feet of wall, where the dandelions and other weeds were large. This took about 10 minutes, including scraping them into piles. I then went around the building with my string trimmer, for a nice finished look. By yanking the big ones ahead of time I was able to get them out in one piece and not have them flung all over the place by the string trimmer.

I tried it on soft ground and it's not very effective. The best use for this tool seems to be to yank larger weeds that poke up between bricks and in cracks in asphalt and concrete. Many weeds that come up in a place like this tend to spread out flat over the surface, as a dandelion does. These are perfect candidates for this type of extraction.