Tool:
Titanium Pry Bar, Nail Puller, Crowbar (550-650mm)

Transcript:
Hi, I’m Sean Michael Ragan, and this is Cool Tools. Here’s an object which I personally find quite amazing: a 21 inch (that’s 530 millimeter) crowbar made of solid titanium. It weighs just 1.5 lbs (or 695 grams) and though I don’t have an identical steel crowbar for comparison, this one is just 14% percent longer but weighs 150% percent more, which if you run through the math correcting for their different lengths and cross-sections, is about what we’d expect given the relative densities of iron and titanium. There’s also the spark color test, which is not really a nice way to treat your crowbar, but is a pretty good way to test its mettle, as it were. I bought this guy through a mail-order catalog 25 years ago, which was just 4 years after the break-up of the Soviet Union, where it was originally made. I paid a bit more than $100 for it at the time and considered that not just a good deal but an outright steal. Nowadays, you still can’t buy these on Amazon but you can get them shipped directly from the Russian Federation through eBay for even less in 2020 dollars than I paid back in 1995: just $80, including transoceanic shipping. At the time of production, the only even remotely similar tool available through Amazon in the US is this little skeletonized twelve-inch nail-puller which goes for almost exactly the same price, but is barely half as long. Alright, thank you for watching. As always, there’s affiliate links in the description field below the video. If you’ve seen anything you like, please do check those out, as well as our blog and our podcast over at cool-tools.org. We’ll see you next time.

-- Sean Michael Ragan 10/13/20