Roger Bisby takes delivery of two Swiss-made heavy wrecking bars and goes in search of jobs that need this kind of leverage.
The Swiss-made Murxi bar sounds like something you might want to eat but you would do serious damage to your teeth if you took a bite out of this drop forged wrecking bar from the Swiss engineering company Alba Krapf.
There are wrecking bars that come out of China and have fancy names to make them sound stronger than they really are but these fellas are serious tools.
Give me a lever long enough and I could move the world said Archimedes in one of his more cocky moments. He was not taking into account the fact that a long lever would bend and therefore it needs to be not only long but very strong.
Never mind Archimedes, drop forges were thin on the ground in ancient Greece but we are a lot better equipped these days. If you are regularly taking buildings apart and pulling nails from timber then these bars will do what other bars can’t.
Unfortunately I had limited opportunity to try them out but even picking them up I was struck by just how much heavier they are than other bars I own.
If you think that Swiss engineering is all about fancy watches and cuckoo clocks then think again. For a start they are tunnellers which means they use massive machines that bore through rock and if they need a little leverage to free a jammed head or machine part then big bars are what they need and the Swiss know that the Alba Krapf forge is the place to go.
I have seen the process that goes into making these bars and they are still hand made by guys who sweat a lot and wield red hot heavy metal with big tongs.