Choosing good bonsai tools

Our three recommendations for bonsai tools for beginners are simple: a sharp pair of shears, a concave branch cutter, and a bamboo chopstick. Skip to content Reading Time: 6 minutes There comes a time where every new bonsai tree owner gets the itch to buy specialty tools.

Bonsai Tools For Beginners vs. Bamboo Chopsticks It might come as a surprise that the one of the best bonsai tools for beginners in a simple bamboo chopstick. Pruning Shears When it comes time to prune your tree, a nice, sharp pair of bonsai shears are indispensable. There are a few different types of shears to choose from: Materials: Carbon Steel vs.

Carbon, being less expensive, is also susceptible to rust, while stainless steel is not. Stainless steal tools are often fully silver. Butterfly shears are also often used for trimming roots. Either will do fine. Concave Branch Cutters Bonsai design sometimes involves removing branches.

So if you are only going to purchase one wire cutter my recommendation would be the general purpose type. Shop Wire Cutters. Sometimes it is impossible to avoid having to unwind the wire a little if it has severely bitten into the wood.

The best way in which to do this is to use the general bonsai pliers. Sometimes it is necessary to change the shape of thick branches. Wiring makes this possible but in order to make the bends one is required to make the bends by hand.

With thicker branches it is not possible to do this in a controlled fashion. The branch bender makes it possible to place controlled and tight bends into wired branches as the jaws of the tool can be opened and closed to suit the size bend and branch thickness. Shop Branch Benders. You might ask what are pliers doing in the section on bending large branches. Well what you may not know is that the pliers can actually be extremely helpful when trying to bend thick branches which have been wired.

This is especially so if the branches are short and thick and where the branch bender cannot fit. So instead of holding the wired branch and bending it with two hands you will hold the tree or branch to keep it steady and with the other hand holding the pliers you will use the pliers to grip the wire and bend the wire and the branch will follow.

In fact I will often use two pliers, each one holding a different section of the wire. This allows me to put pretty controlled bends into short stocky branches without damage to the branch as the bend can be done quite slowly.

Bonsai pliers are not shaped like your usual DIY pliers. The head is dramatically different and it is so for a reason. This might be to gain access to tight spots, or it might be for leverage. The DIY pliers has a bulky head with bulky handles making it rather clunky to with on a bonsai tree. Sometimes it is not possible to use wire coiled around a trunk alone to create the necessary curves you need.

In such cases the only tool which can be used is the branch jack and wire stays. The branch jack makes contact onto the tree at strategic points, depending on where you need to make the necessary bend. If necessary the position of the hook of the branch jack can be swivelled to make better contact with the tree. The threaded rod is tightened or loosened, depending on the curve you require. Wire stays are then used to hold everything in position so that the branch jack can be removed. Shop Branch Jack.

When especially thick branches or trunks need to be bent then a specialist tool, the trunk or branch splitter is needed. Branch splitters are available in several different sizes and have a tapering blade in a kind of wedge shape. To use these tools simply close the jaws on the section of the tree which needs to be bent and once they have bitten into the woodier internals, wiggle or twist the tool slightly until the area is split. Repeat this along a straight line for as long as needed.

You can also make an additional split, so you essentially have 4 quadrants. This will enable you to make compound bends or simply bend an especially thick trunk or branch. Splitters are not the same as root cutters, despite the fact that at a quick glance they appear to look very much the same.

The root cutter has a much thicker blades, required for the purpose they are designed. Trunk and branch splitters have much thinner blades and thus are not suitable for cutting thick roots and branches as they are likely to break.

In contrast the root cutter blades are too thick to be used to split material. When trees are exposed to the elements in nature there are sometimes casualties; lost branches, sections of a tree which die from a lightning strike or even attacks from animals.

What often results are parts of the tree which wither and die and thereby add character to the tree. This same effect can be utilized in bonsai. To artificially create jin, or deadwood branches, and shari, or deadwood sections on a trunk can require immense skill and patience. However there is a fairly wide variety of tools which can help you along the way. These would include a good set of graving chisels which are sold with and without handles.

The business end of the tool is shaped in different ways so that when used in typical Japanese pulling fashion, they remove wood from the area being carved in different patterns.

A set of western type chisels such as gouges and more are also very useful for removing wood. Very detailed work can be done quite rapidly using a Dremel which has a very wide variety of bits available to it. In contrast, a power tool such as the die grinder can be used to rapidly remove large amounts of material before detailed work is begun.

A tool which I recently discovered and which I am amazed at the versatility is the small Jin tool from Kikuwa. It does not look like much but this combination tool allows you to remove bark from live veins on junipers when preparing them for a show with the slightly blunt tip on the one side of the tool, but with the other end you have a graving tool which can be used to carve deadwood.

The same end can also be used to remove old wood from cuts which have not yet healed over, in preparation for resealing them. Shop Jin Tool. Another hand tool which can be most useful to quickly create interesting and natural jin is the jin pliers. Unlike the typical bonsai pliers, the head of the jin pliers is shaped at an angle and has teeth which make it effective at grasping wood fibres and then allowing you to pull these fibres away creating a more natural deadwood feature than one often finds as the result of power tools.

With such a hand tool there is no risk associated with high speed cutting bits or with chisels which cut through fibres leaving a less natural finish. The jin pliers allows you to pull wood fibres when creating deadwood features leaving a very natural looking effect.

Shop Jin Pliers. Close to Somerset West? Collect your order 9am - 5pm weekdays. Soil Growing Mediums and Substrates. Pruning is the key. By learning how to judiciously prune, you can keep your tree small and shape it to look natural. For most trees, the best time to prune is during the growing season, in spring and summer. If two branches are growing from the same area, a good rule of thumb is to prune away one of them.

The most unnatural look is a bonsai tree with thick upper branches. Be sure to prune those away. Defoliation works. One technique to get your tree to grow better leaves is to trim all of the existing ones off during the summer so new leaves are encouraged to grow.

Use wire to shape the tree. Wrapping wire around the branches or the trunk of your tree will allow you to shape the way your tree grows.

But remember that wire is temporary. If you leave the wire on too long, it will damage the tree. How does bonsai work? Turning a tree into a miniature work of art takes a great deal of dedication and patience.

It also requires know-how. These are not special, genetically altered plants that grow in miniature; they are regular trees and shrubs that are trained to remain small through a variety of pruning and wiring techniques. How do I know which tree is best for me? The best first step is to simply select a tree that is indigenous to your area. Finally, you want to pick a tree that you find aesthetically pleasing. Do I need to start a tree from scratch? If you're apprehensive about entering the world of bonsai, you can purchase a pre-bonsai tree.

This special type of tree has already been started and partially trained, but it hasn't reached its final form. BestReviews spends thousands of hours researching, analyzing, and testing products to recommend the best picks for most consumers.

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The tools that you may need may not be available in all the available bonsai tool kits. Understanding different tools and their purposes can help you in understanding the important ones and thus making the right choice of the kit for your needs.

A beginner may consider an entry-level kit that may contain essential tools like tweezers, trimmer, rake, brush, etc. However, an expert may find it useless. The tools that you need also depends on the kind of bonsai trees you have. If you have thick and mature bonsai trees, then you may need to consider a kit that has very durable and reliable tools that do not bend or break easily.

Bonsai tool kits may contain pieces or tools made out of stainless steel or carbon steel. However, you cannot consider any of these materials as superior to another as they have their benefits and issues. It indicates that the buyer should know the exact needs from the tools so that the choice of bonsai tool kits can be easy.