AMES 2233400 9-Pound Steel Tamper with Hardwood Handle, 48-Inch

I was asked to review this product. I gave this item five stars almost all the way across the board. The "easy to use" category is a little misleading. I did eventually figure out how to use this device after watching a few YouTube tutorials. It actually is not complicated to employ. However, because this fine piece of kit weighs nine pounds and requires you to repeatedly lift it up and drive it into whatever you need tamped, I would not say it is "EASY" to use. It takes a deal of muscle, endurance, and coordination to really get your money's worth out of it.At the end of the day, I would not say this is a labor-saving device. They do make gas powered tampers that are specifically engineered to save you from having to manually tamp your substrate (the technical term for dirt). This is not that. What this does is it literally saves you from having to tamp your dirt with something that isn't specifically a tamper. Maybe you have a large bucket that you've filled with sand or concrete and you're repeatedly lifting that up and letting it fall back down again on your dirt. Technically you are still tamping the dirt, just not with a tamper. A tamper, gets you around that problem.

I didn’t use this for yard or pot hole I had so much trash I smashed it down. Work perfectly for it. This is a temper tool very well put together.

Just received this in 2days!! Really sturdy and will do the job well. My family for some reason can't seem to understand that compressed garbage is good for everyone! Especially my grandsons whose job it is to take it out during the week and get it to the curb on trash day. Less trash bag space taken =less trash bags to haul out. Easy peasy right?? Wellllllll you would think I was asking them to give up a lung by the way they react to my asking them to smash the trash!Now with this, they suddenly want to be the smasher.=) What took me so long to think of it??? I dunno but it was really inexpensive and seems to be really good quality. Heavy and we'll constructed.Also it can serve as protection of my home gets invaded. ( j/ k.) Mostly.

Sadly I haven't had a lot of use with thus item yet, and will give a better review when I get the chance (hard to get someone to deliver soil to me to grow grass and tamp it down atm). But I can say, my cat really didn't like this item/box for whatever reason. She is 8 years old and never really had an issue of going outside the kitty box other than when I tried switching litter and she didn't like the new litter; but there was some element of this box/package that she hated and over the two days that I left it in my foyer, she peed on the box at minimum three times it appeared. Sorry this review doesn't help a ton, but it appears to work well in the limited use I've got out of it; hoping after the summer heat to get to use it more to grow grass this fall. But it was a mess just taking it out of my foyer and cleaning it to out in my garage after my cat covered some odor on it.

Some may think "nine pounds? How's that going to tamp anything? I'd better look for a bigger one." An overlooked feature of this tamper is that it works sort of like a good string trimmer that adds a little string each time it starts. This tamper adds a little bit of weight with each stroke so that by the time you've gone thirty feet tamping the fill for a walkway it has increased in weight to about fifty pounds. I don't know why such an important feature isn't mentioned in the description.It works well - I'm building a concrete walkway that will be covered with brick pavers. The concrete needs a compacted base. Sprinkle with water and use this thing and it gets good and hard. I think doing it twice will give me a very stable base.

We used it for packing dirt and worked great . It takes some time to develop a technique.I think people break them out of the box because they do not know how to use them, as hard to believe it, is true .I think yes, they will break quickly if you hit in an angle or on the side of the plate on very uneven ground with rocks or very hard packed soil because of leverage since the pole is on the center. And look, if you break the pole its no big deal , the metal plate is very well done it will last forever, just go to any welder/welding shop and weld a metal pipe to it, cheap, strong, and simple.I hope i explained myself since my main language is not english.Cheers

I've read so many reviews that say the handle breaks and it's no good, but I don't think people understand how to properly use this tool. It's not a compactor, and it's not intended to pound a mountain into the ground. People slam their tampers down like they are trying to cause an earthquake in China. And also over severely uneven ground, and off-center to boot. They slam the same side of the plate over rocks, bricks, tree-roots, 2x4s, etc. then are dumbfounded when it snaps the handle. It would be funny if it weren't so sad. Anyway, the product is completely adequate, assuming you understand what you are doing.

Man, I'm not sure I possess the natural ability to describe this amazing tool! We use this tamper to smash our trash so that we don't have to pay $12 a month for a second trash can, and let me tell you - it WORKS! What a versatile tool, too! You can use it, not only to tamp, but also to... uh... well... okay, so you can only tamp with it. But OH MAN, the way you can tamp! You can tamp lightly! You can tamp mediumly! You can tamp viciously, with reckless abandon! YOU are the only limitation to this amazing tool!