Well, two weeks ago we looked through a couple of sets of wheels and examined some of the repairs
that needed to be done and we got to listen to what a real loose tire sounds like. So this week
I got those repairs done, reset the tires, so now we can compare and see what a real tight tire should sound like.
Well last week we kind of had a pretty cold start to the week
So this is a good opportunity to do some steam bending which I need to do.
I need to bend some chuck wagon bows and also some covered wagon bows.
Now I generally don't have heat on the second half of the shop.
The steam bender is actually that source of heat.
So when I started out it was only about 38 degrees.
Now the main difference between a chuckwagon bow and a covered wagon bow primarily is in the height.
A covered wagon, as the pioneers were headed out west, had a little extra height,
usually about six feet so that they could stand inside the box as it was traveling.
Well, a chuckwagon bow primarily just needs a cover to cover the kitchen box in the back, called the chuck box,
and oftentimes the bed rolls for the cowboys.
So these bows don't need to stand near as tall.
So the first ones I'm going to bend are going to be chuckwagon bows. You'll see they're a little shorter.
Then I've got some 38s and some 42" covered wagon bows I also need to bend.
The most common size bows that I bend are 5/8 of an inch thick
and two inches wide.
In this case I'm going to bend six at a time.
So this first set is the chuck wagon bows.
The total length is 13 foot.
The second set is going to be for covered wagon bows.
They're still the same 5/8 by 2,
but these are 14 foot in length for the extra height.
So the two most common box width sizes are 38s and 42".
The first ones I bent were 38".
I'm also going to bend some 42 inch covered wagon bows.
On the set of buggy wheels, the two rear wheels both had felloe halves that had some damage to them.
One had a warped section to it and the other had a broken section right at a spoke.
Well, the warped section took up about two-thirds of this one felloe half,
And the broken felloe, at the spoke,
was in the one-third of the other felloe half.
So I actually could take the two, I cut out the two-thirds that was bad,
and replaced the one-third with the remaining one-third of the first half,
if all that makes sense.
So I was able to keep the original two felloe halves
and combine them into one for one wheel,
and just had to replace one felloe half on the second wheel.
Well one front wheel had a spoke that was needing repairs, so I did replace that one also.
These pony dray wheels primarily just need to be resized and tightened back up.
Again I do put wedges in the spoke tenons to kind of snug those up.
I've got one wheel that needs a
new felloe half, so we're going to do those repairs then go ahead and set all the tires at one time.
Well, we had the south winds blow and it really turned our temperatures around. So oftentimes
I don't get the opportunity, through the winter time, to open up the doors and blow out the dust.
But we had a pretty warm day, so I'm going to take the
leaf blower that Makita has sent to me and blow this shop out.
So now I'll replay what these wheels sounded like before
we did the repairs on them, and what they sounded like afterwards.
Well I did get the hubs finished for this chuckwagon, that I
didn't get finished last week,
so hopefully maybe next week we'll get started on building those wheels.
Once again, thanks for following along.
Thanks for watching!