Well a couple videos back I tore apart a farm wagon undercarriage that I'm going to rebuild
and turn into a chuck wagon. I need to put all new wood in this undercarriage so I have
all the iron sandblasted and I did take the time to go and paint all this iron.
Well, one of the first things I need to do in the rebuild process is to put new wood in the axles.
Now there was a while ago that I did a video explaining how axles are gauged, but at that time I was explaining
how it was done on steel axles. I'm going to go back, a little flashback in time, and bring out a
little excerpt from that video. So in modern day alignments, when you take your automobile into
the alignment shop, they adjust for three different things; caster, camber, and toe. In camber it has to do
if you were looking at the vehicle front to back, has to do with the angle of the wheel, side to side.
Well in a buggy or carriage we are concerned about what would be camber on a on a vehicle. It's called
swing on a carriage. And the third thing in a vehicle that's measured and adjusted is
the toe-in. Well that is also a concern on a buggy or carriage that they have this toe in,
and that old term is called gather. So we adjust a buggy, or a carriage, not so much for caster, but
we do for camber and for toe, and those old terms are called gather and swing.
Well one of the main differences between those type of an axle using an axle gauge and a hydraulic press to push these
spindles into their correct position. On a wood axle for a farm wagon, these measurements for
the gather and swing have to be actually carved into the wood axle itself, so this video is going
to go through the process of how I examine an old axle to find out where it is set and kind
of give the general principles of the how and why wood axles are gauged to go to a farm wagon.
Well these axles are actually still intact and are really nice to be able to measure off of.
Sometimes you're going to find a farm wagon undercarriage that's either been wrecked,
axles broken, or they're rotted so bad you can't tell just how they should have been set, so part
of this is just to explain, and to demonstrate, how an axle gauge is set into a wood axle.
Often times I take a straight edge, as I'm going to show here, and show how the toe in, or the gather, is set
on these axles.
So you can see as I put a straight edge across the leading edge, if measure
from the end of the axle to my straight edge, one side has a half inch, the back side has 5/8
of an inch. So you can see there is 1/8 inch lead in the spindle on this wood axle, very
similar to what i do on a steel axle, but again this has to be set so it can be carved in place,
not pressed into place. And this also shows that the front axle and the rear axle are actually
gauged the same, even though there are different diameters of wheels on both the front and the back.
So these skeins, inside these skeins, don't come all the way down to the shoulder.
I'm going to try to show you inside here, with the use of this flashlight, you can see that down
and the end there's a shoulder that comes up just short of these threads in this shoulder.
It actually stops more about in this space here, so what we're measuring on the wood is
actually from about this distance here, and if I run a tape measure inside down to this shoulder
it's going to be a different measurement than it's going to be clear here to the end. So this
one ends up being 12 and a half inches from the shoulder inside to this point here on the skein.
So the measurement here on the wood axle that I have a little
x here is, actually correlating to the collar on the skein, so from one point on one side of
the axle to the other side is actually collar to collar, similar to what it would be collar
to collar on a steel axle. So now when I run a straight edge from these two, collar to collar,
you can see the drop in the spindle angle on this wood axle.
So now if you went back and watched that video regarding the axle gauge, where I use it on a
steel axle for a buggy or a carriage, you can see that the numbers are the same as they
correlate to a wood axle. I use 1/8 of an inch toe in, or the gather, and also comes out being
3/8 of an inch swing that brings the bottom spoke into plum. So even though we're not using a
regular axle gauge and steel axles, that we can press through the press to put them in position,
the measurements are the same. It's how we get to the end is a little bit different.
On a wood axle these have to be carved into position, for a steel axle they can be pressed.
I've got some 16 quarter white ash here that I'm going to use for axles and I'll get these
blanks prepped down to size three and a half by four and a half 60 inches overall.
You know, it's very rare that I go through a week and I only focus on one project.
Oftentimes I have multiple different jobs and projects that show up that I'm working on at once.
Well this week I've also got to bend some bows run them through the steamer and bend some sheep wagon bows
so in the midst of working on these axles i've got some bending to do.
So this is maybe a little more brief take on some of my steam bending. You are probably well aware
that I have a fairly in-depth playlist regarding just how to steam bend both the sheep wagon and bows
and multiple other styles of different weights of wood that I bend. If you're interested in my
steam bending you can check that playlist out. well my table saw is a 1980 feyen eagan it's an
Well, my table saw is a 1908 Faye and Eagan. It's an
old timer. babbitt bearing saw. It actually runs two 16 inch blades. It's a dual arbor saw, but
it's heavy enough that I can run this four inch, 16 quarter ash through to cut out these axle blanks.
So with the center line and angles figured out on my old wood axles, now
it's just a process of transferring that over to my new wood axle blanks.
So I think you can see that the design and structure of a wood axle is very similar in
principle to that of a steel axle, it's just the approach is a little bit different, but the angles
are all the same basically. So now we've got it transferred over the question is how do we carve
it down to fit correctly. Most all of us are going to do this by hand. Now I have two axles to do.
I think I'm going to do one by hand and I'm going to put the other
in my duplicating machine and see how the two compare. That'll come up next.
Thanks for watching!