The best and easiest finish I use for almost all wood finishes is Tru-Oil gunstock finish. About $6. It's a little 3 ounce bottle and you can just rub it on with your fingers. It goes a long way. A 3 ounce bottle would refinish a lot of handles. It provides a lasting beautiful finish. It's a real finish not just an oil treatment. It's even available in Wal-Mart's sporting goods dept. or other places too. Follow the linkto the Tru-Oil gunstock "finish" not the "wax". Here is a link that might be useful: Tru-Oil Gunstock Finish

I occasionally take my small hand trimmers and all the household shears in to a local gardening center/ grain store that sharpens them. (In fact they badly need a trip to the sharpeners this year.) I'm afraid my long handled and short handled pruners have never been sharpened, but I do occasionally spray their joints and blades with WD40 to keep them operational and to allay rust. Kitchen knives I sharpen myself with a whetstone or knife sharpener. I once attempted to sharpen a pair of cheap scissors, and did improve them somewhat, but I would hesitate to try it on a more valuable pair of shears, garden or household. As others said, getting the angle right is tricky.

Interesting discussion...I use most of the fore mentioned tools however a bit differently than most of you. The hand fork (cultivator tool) is a must for any vermiculturist, and you need not worry about harming the worms...they are tough enough to withstand all sorts of rough treatment, and believe me I've done them all in the past 50 plus years. I use a glass bowl blender to feed worms in my four indoor plastic bins, and trench alternating sides of the bins when feeding. The fork is used to incorporate peat moss, coffee grounds and the blended peelings, etc. Although worms do not like to be bothered, I do a thorough mixing of one side of each bin when feeding leaving a couple of inches on the bottom undisturbed. The bottom couple of inches is a good place to put some corn cobs which the worms really like for depositing their eggs. The kitty litter scoop and a plastic window scraper are used to remove the top layer of "spent media" as I prefer to call it. By using a florescent light fixture above my four indoor bins I get a half inch layer of this ready made germination or potting mix each time I feed my worms. This may not work for some of you since your media may be a lot more moist than mine. Worm activity on the sides of the bin or top cover (which I don't use) would negate this method of removal of the the spent media. I replace the removed, spent media, with soaked peat moss using the rubber kitchen gloves and a six inch aquarium net to ring out as much of the acetic water as possible before adding to the bins. Using a five gallon pail to soak your media weather peat moss, choir, cardboard, newspaper, etc., helps remove some of the impurities which your worms will appreciate, and it will allow you to control the correct amount of moisture content for mixing in with your vermicomposting media. I use a 1/4 mesh framed screen to grate my spent media, and a larger version for my six sunken raised beds which also serve as outdoor vermicomposting in the fall and winter months. Grating this material makes it really easy to work with when filling cow pots for garden seedlings, or larger potted plants like peppers. I was vermiculturing well before plastic tubs came along and ultimately switched to vermicomposting for gardening, The 18 gallon RubberMaid tubs (without holes drilled in them) are now by far my favorite means of indoor vermicomposting. I know many of you have the fancier versions which produce pure castings in a shorter amount of time than my methods, and there never seems to be enough of this material for all the things we like to plant. I have about 7,500 sq ft of garden area and I go through a lot of vermicompost each year, so I use the simplest and least expensive means and methods possible for my gardening operations. As a side note thirstypotato, I use a great deal if my outdoor vemicompost (aged cow or horse manure, grass clippings, ground cardboard, etc.) when planting my seed potatoes. I have six-60 ft rows for potatoes which are planted in trenches dug with a Mantis tiller and plow attachment. After trenching I use a post hole digger to make holes about a foot apart in the bottom of the trench where the seed potatoes are deposited. Then I mix some of the top soil with the outdoor vermicompost and back fill the trenches. I also dig 18 inch deep and wide holes for squash, cucumbers, pumpkin, and tomato transplants using the same composition for backfilling these holes. So as you can see there is never enough of this wonderful material to go around. But we can all thank our worms for making vermicomposting 17 times faster, and 4 to 5 times richer than just plain composting.

Just pour from the original bottle into the jars used for pruners, so yes, decant. Keep several jars at the ready for differently sized pruning tools. Plastic jar for the handheld bypass pruner stored with other oft-used hand tools, gloves, essential oils insect repellent, Elmer's & more in a half-size metal bucket I usually carry into the garden. Jar of alcohol for loppers is kept in the garage beside them. That one's a 4-pound bright yellow plastic Domino sugar jar with a hand grip molded into the side. Tall narrow one for a folding pruning saw. I've come to think of these as pairs, lol, routinely using them together. Sue