Welcome to Tnet! Looks great for competition hunts. For general beach hunting, I need a long handled scoop with the basket angle going the other way. It would need to be a LOT bigger for me too. I like a big, wide basket for quick recoveries and lessen the chance of damaging the target. For water and cobble searches, it would never hold up IMO. Without some extensive gusseting between the handle and basket, it will develop cracks where the handle attaches. With that design, the basket will probably start to collapse if you step on the back to shove the scoop into hard packed sand. If you don't mind bending a bit, it should work fine in fluffy dry sand, but, If that is the only thing you use it for, the expense of titanium is not needed.
yes, you are right. The handle should be the other way so that you can push with foot or at least at 90 degrees. We may make more prototypes a little bigger and also use a longer handle. Thanks for your feedback.
Great looking drysand scoop, and a great start. Titanium is a tough metal to work with, very light weight and strong.
I had a friend that did several scoops several years ago and my dream was to have a titanium scoop. So I bought all the metal, and paid for the labor..water jetting, rolling and had two made, 300 dollars later I had my dream. Super light, can't remember but the scoop itself was around 2 pounds, then I added a fiber glass handle which total weight was around 3.5 pounds..I think. Five years later I still have one and one broke. Lots of miles on those babies. Now have a SS 720 as my main scoop and the Ti is the back up. After using SS and Titanium the only advantage I seen was the weight factor in Ti.
Titanium .071/.050 Picture two titanium skins, ................................middle 304 SS, ...................................Titanium and SS 720
Hello OBN, Your Titanium scoop looks good and it seems that you managed to avoid welding, which is not easy on it. If you had drawings or something to have more details of the construction, we could probably make others. Using a fiberglass or Carbon shaft is not a problem as we have sources for those. The Sunspot Scoops are really good and I did get some. They last and last and last . Very well make and despite price never regretted but they are not light....