Dig In With a Krazy Beaver Shovel

How does one begin to write a review about a shovel? How does one test a shovel and measure its performance? It’s not an overly complicated tool. It’s a tool we all know and have experience using. It has no moving parts. It is just a shovel… right?

Maybe not.

If you have never seen a Krazy Beaver shovel, then it’s appropriate to start with a visual. Without this, you really cannot begin to appreciate why this shovel is different from your standard issue shovel. Lets take a look…

What the shovel?

Did you notice those teeth?

This isn’t just a shovel… it is a pointy tipped piece of mud eating earth digging badassery.

For background, Krazy Beaver Tools is a small family-owned business based in Colorado. The owner, Jason, is a police officer with experience working and patrolling remote areas of the United States. He was also a member of the FEMA search and rescue teams. The point? Jason has experience using professional-grade tools to conduct rescue and recovery operations. He saw a need in the market for a professional shovel — something hunters, first responders, off-roaders, and more could use. And he wanted it to be of the finest quality and American-made.

Krazy Beaver Tools specializes in shovels. While Jason offers a few other products, their bread & butter is shovels that chew up dirt, rocks, sand, mud, and anything else that dare be in the blade’s path. And the design centers around creating a shovel that is durable, dependable, and ready for any situation.

Off-road, a shovel can be a valuable tool, particularly in recovery operations. We have also used shovels to prepare camp on the beach, dig a toilet, excavate a fire pit, and even pick up trash. If we are going off-road, a shovel has always been part of our gear.

Until recently, that shovel was a compact travel shovel from Harbor Freight. It was “fine”. It dug holes and moved sand. It also rusted and was so small that it required hunching at a weird angle.

The Krazy Beaver shovel is 40” long, which is just long enough to be comfortable using, but shorter than your average garden shovel. That makes transporting it and storing it also easier.

The blade of this shovel is really what stands out from your average shovel. For starters, it has teeth. I was a little skeptical of the tooth shovel concept — I figured the first time those teeth were bashed into the hard earth, they’d flex and bend. Incorrect. The teeth, and the entire blade, is made of heavy duty steel. They claim it is twice as thick as your standard residential shovel — never having measured the thickness of the steel of my shovel before, I’ll have to trust them on that.

The teeth are designed to help cut and dig through tough landscape. I haven’t tested it on sand, but I’d assume the impact of those teeth would not be as prominent in softer terrain. But the teeth dug right through the root-laden ground we were camping on so we could safely excavate a fire pit. I assume the teeth will also be useful to crack frozen ground and ice, or in really goopy soil like thick clay. Lacking both of those right now, I couldn’t test it, but I feel very confident the shovel would take on those situations like a champ.

Krazy Beaver applies a bright powder coating treatment to the shovel blade. Mine is a luxurious shade of metallic candy apple red. They also offer the shovel in black for those favoring a more discreet look — but the real prize is to watch their social media and website for special “one off” colors. Lime green, hot pink, rich purple — I’ve seen them make a lot of fun designs!

The handle of the shovel is made from fiberglass with a D-shaped grip made from a plastic polymer. For the price of this shovel, you might expect the handle to be made of something more luxurious than plastic, but this is a working shovel. Krazy Beaver points out that rubber or other soft materials are not used on the handle is because those products break down over time, becoming sticky and ruining an expensive product. Many of us will also store the shovel outside mounted to our rig, so I appreciate the attention to making a product that will withstand the abuse of being stored outdoors.

Given the non-trivial price of this shovel, I would recommend serious consideration to where you mount it and secure it. I will be using a padlock on mine when I use the Hi-Vis Overland mounts to attach it to the rooftop tent. Krazy Beaver does sell some mounts for the shovel, but they don’t accept a lock, and I would recommend they look at options to secure the shovel in a theft-resistant way.

Time will tell how the shovel holds up to the use and abuse of trail and overland life. I’ll be curious to see if those teeth are all still straight and pointy after a few years of use, and how well the finish holds up to being jammed into the earth.

This shovel will be with me on every journey. It is a piece of gear that I hope I don’t have to use too often — or at least not for recoveries (I prefer to not get stuck in the first place!) But when I do have to reach for a shovel, I’m glad it’ll be this earth eater.

Buy online at https://krazybeavertools.com/