Journal · 3 MAY 2026 · 3 min read

Why the handle is padauk

Ash is the default. Hickory is the standard. I picked the wood almost nobody uses. Here's the actual reason.

Every shovel I've ever owned had an ash handle. A few had hickory. One had fiberglass, and it cracked at the ferrule the second winter. Ash and hickory are the defaults because they're cheap, they're plentiful in North America and Europe, and they bend before they snap. They're good wood. They're not the best wood for this job.

I went with padauk for the S13 and I want to write down why before someone asks me at a trail and I shrug and say "feels right." It's not just feel.

The numbers

Padauk (Pterocarpus soyauxii, the African one) sits at around 12,000 lbf on the Janka hardness scale. Hickory is roughly 1,800. White ash is 1,320. So padauk is six to nine times harder than the standard tool handle wood. That's not marketing. That's the wood itself. You can dent ash with a fingernail if you push. You cannot dent padauk with anything short of a hammer strike.

Hardness matters for a shovel handle in one specific way: where your bottom hand slides up and down the shaft during a dig cycle. After a season on a soft handle you can see the wear pattern — the wood compresses, fibers fuzz, the grip loosens. On padauk, after twenty hours of digging the handle still feels like the day I sanded it.

The bend

Hardness isn't the whole story. A handle has to flex without snapping. Padauk's modulus of rupture is around 16,000 psi versus 15,000 for hickory — so it's comparable in resistance to bending, and it stays elastic instead of going brittle the way some tropical hardwoods do. The fibers are long and straight, which is what you want. The wood I rejected for the prototype was wenge — harder still, but the grain runs in fits and starts and the failure mode is splintering rather than bending. You don't want a shovel handle that splinters in your hand.

The color

Honest answer: this also matters. Palarosa means "pink wood." Padauk is the wood the brand is named after. Fresh-milled it's almost neon orange. After three months of UV it deepens to brick red, then a deeper red-brown over the years. The handle ages. The shovel gets its own face from being used outside.

You don't get that with painted ash.

The cost

A padauk handle blank costs me about four times what an ash blank costs. That's why nobody uses it. For a $30 garden shovel the math doesn't work. For a tool you're going to dig with for ten years, four times the handle cost is one decent dinner. It's the right place to spend the money.

What you'd notice

If you picked up an S13 next to an ash-handle shovel of the same dimensions, the padauk version weighs about 120 grams more. You'd feel that. After an hour of cutting lips you wouldn't.