YEELOR YLUS1177

Three handle lengths

165.1 cm. 129.5 cm. 95 cm.

The only height adjustment on this shelf, and on a rake it changes more than any property of the head.

Because raking is a posture, not a task

Every other consideration on this shelf — width, tine count, material, weight — affects how fast leaves move.

Handle length decides how far you bend.

And raking leaves is the garden job most often abandoned because of a back rather than because it is finished: an hour, bent forward, pulling repeatedly, in November, in the cold.

165 cm lets a tall person work close to upright, with the pull coming from the shoulders and body rather than from a bent spine.

95 cm is for close work — under a shrub, on a bank, on a terrace, kneeling — and for a shorter user.

Most rakes are one length, chosen by whoever designed the packaging, and everybody adapts to it. One rake on this shelf gets at the same problem differently, through a modular handle range that includes a long back-sparing pattern sold separately.

This one includes three lengths in the tool.

Spring steel, and the trade

“High-quality spring steel tines. Great elasticity, not easily deformed, will not fatigue or break after repeated use.”

That names the right property. A rake tine is not asked to be strong — it is asked to be elastic: to bend under load and return, thousands of times a season, cold and wet and full of grit.

What fails on a cheap rake is a permanent set. A tine that stays bent no longer reaches the ground at the same angle as its neighbours, so it stops picking anything up. An old plastic rake has splayed outer tines and has stopped working before anything has broken.

Spring steel is the material that resists that, and this is one of only two steel rakes on this shelf — the other is flat galvanised steel.

And what steel gives up: gentleness.

Four rakes here have plastic tines, which flex enough to ride over the sward and lift loose material without digging in. On a soft wet lawn in autumn, steel pulled hard lifts grass crowns out with the leaves, and it scratches paving.

So the split on this shelf is a real one:

Dry leaves on a lawn — plastic is the better tool.

Matted wet material, pine needles, straw, acorns — steel is, and this listing names exactly those.

The self-clearing trick

From the last feature line: “If the rake is clogged with dirt, simply turn it over and pull it once on the ground. It cleans itself, so leaves and grass slide off the tines effortlessly.”

That is the single most useful practical note on this shelf, and it works for a mechanical reason.

A fan rake’s tines are curved, and material collects in the hollow of the curve. Pulling in the normal direction packs it in tighter, which is why a rake stops working halfway across a lawn and why everybody ends up pulling wet leaves out by hand.

Turn the head over and the curve is reversed. One pull flexes every tine the other way and the whole mass releases at once.

It costs nothing, it takes two seconds, and no other listing in this family mentions it.

The double-bolt fixing

“A double-bolt fixing structure ensures a stable and firm connection.”

Worth noting because the head-to-handle joint is what fails on a complete rake.

Raking is a pull with a twist. Every stroke loads the joint sideways as the head catches, and a single-bolt or friction fitting works loose: first a rattle, then play, then the socket splits where the handle has been hammering it.

Two bolts cannot rotate relative to each other, which is the whole point. The same manufacturer makes the same claim on this site’s aerator shelf, about a dethatching rake with the same head width — and that is worth a second look.

The rake next door, which is not this rake

The same maker sells a dethatching rake on this site’s aerator shelf: 43.2 cm head, spring steel tines, adjustable stainless handle to 167.6 cm, double-bolt head fixing.

Every one of those matches this product.

What differs is what actually separates the two tools: tine spacing and stiffness. That listing publishes 21 pairs of tines across its 43.2 cm — perhaps twice the density of a leaf rake — with a half-round hooked profile designed to dig into the mat of dead grass between the green blades and the soil.

A leaf rake rides over the sward. A dethatcher digs into it. Done at the wrong time of year, the second one makes a mess of a lawn and the first one achieves nothing.

This listing publishes no tine count, which means the one figure that would tell you which tool it is has been left out. What the text points at is leaves, straw, pine needles, acorns and yard debris — so it reads as the leaf rake of the pair.

Anybody buying both should check the tine spacing on arrival, and use them in different months.

About the price

The dearest rake on this shelf, at more than three times the cheapest complete tool here.

What it buys, itemised: a handle (five of seven rakes here have none), three lengths of it, spring steel rather than plastic, a double-bolt joint, and the fact that it dismantles for storage.

What it does not buy: a published tine count or a published weight — and two plastic heads on this shelf publish weights of 560 g and 360 g, against a steel head with a steel handle that will certainly be heavier than either.

On a tool held out at the end of a 1.65 m lever for an hour, that is the figure most worth having.

Availability

From 35 € to 50 €, that being the spread across the German, French, Italian and Spanish Amazon stores on the day of the survey.

Beyond the euro zone, the American and British Amazon stores price it in their own currencies, which the spread above sets aside.

Taken from Keepa on the day this page was last revised; stock and prices move without notice.