Cobjon's Canada Strap-and-Anvil Cracker™

A winner of a coveted, rarely-bestowed bookofjoe 2004 Product Name Award.

Whoa, Nelly, is what I thought when this baby popped up.

But the product is even better than its great name.

It's a nutcracker for black walnuts.

If you've never tried to crack a black walnut, you can't imagine what it will do to a conventional nutcracker.

Last holiday season I destroyed my Rocket™ trying to open a black walnut with it.

I mean, it took that heavy steel and just deformed it. But I digress.

What with the festive time of year just around the corner, it's time to lay in our stocks of our favorite nuts.

Black walnuts are an acquired taste: powerful, musky, nothing like the English walnuts usually seen and eaten in the U.S.

Anyway.

Cobjon Nutculture Services, based in Ottawa, Canada, is all about nuts, "helping you grow nuts and nut trees successfully, at the Northern Edge."

Now, I've never heard the term "Northern Edge," not even back in the day when I was a boy growing up on the frozen tundra of Milwaukee.

I gather it refers to the Northern limit in Canada of where stuff will grow before the cold makes it a no-go.

Maybe a Canadian joehead - and there are many, scattered across that magnificent country, from Nunavut to New Brunswick - will enlighten us.

Anyway.

The Cobjon Canada Strap-and-Anvil Cracker™ is an adjustable leather strap which holds the black walnut down, stabilizing it on the (included) anvil, while you hammer the hell out of it with the (included) hammer.

Like the website says: "No shrapnel when you are cracking the tougher nuts... like Black Walnut!"

Nice.

No more flesh wounds when I all I want is a handful of nuts.

From the website:

The hammer is a flat-faced, curved-claw style that can be used around the house for other purposes from time-to-time, when nut cracking is not Job 1.

The Anvil is rolled steel so that it will not crack as the older casting iron anvils were prone to do.

It is shaped as a flat square, of about 2 kilos (5 lb.).

With its bottom foam padding it can be used on the knee while sitting or on a coffee table in front of the TV!

It is powerful, simple, compact, robust, durable, universal, and inexpensive.

No home should be without one!

There you have it.

Costs $50 (Canadian).

You get a kit containing the specially designed Leather Strap, the cushioned Anvil, the Hammer, and detailed instructions with recipes for black walnuts.

Endless hours of hammering, smashing, take-out-all-your-aggression fun.

The question of a bookofjoe 2004 Design Award arises.

True - while all three parts are movable, and do move, none of them are connected.

Thus, one could say - and I think I'm going to because it's my site and I make the rules - there are no moving parts.

I mean, the hammer just sits there in your hand until you decide to use it; the anvil just sits on your knee in front of the TV; the leather strap just wraps around the helpless, hapless black walnut, waiting for you to administer the coup de grâce.

So yes - it's a winner.

And it's perfect for the girl who [thinks she] has everything.