If you’ve ever suffered the indignity of trying to hammer a tent peg into hard ground with a cheap, rubber-headed mallet, the new MSR Stake Hammer is for you. There’s no snapping of shafts or bouncing of heads, just a percussive, precise meeting of peg and stainless steel head, as a result of which, the peg generally decides it will penetrate the ground after all…

It’s an amazing thing in an unashamedly over-specified sort of way. If someone handed it to you on the street – probably inadvisable – you’d assume it was some sort of precision-engineered piece of climbing hardware. Like we said, the head is hardened stainless steel complete with dimpled face to minimise slippage if your swing isn’t quite just so.