Beginning the Borax Wagon Project | Turning 320# Blocks to Wagon Hubs

this is the one remaining set of the original borax wagons still in in Death Valley during the 1880s these are on display at the Harmony mine in Death Valley the Death Valley Conservancy is commissioning these wagons to be duplicated in an effort to preserve part of what is known as the big hitch era at the Museum at the furnace Creek Resort there are the remains of two running gears that provide the information necessary to their construction building the wheels is a prime concern and this video shows how that process has begun by turning the hubs from solid white oak blocks when these blocks arrived here they weighed from 290 to 320 pounds and they came in as octagons 24 inches long so to get these onto the lathe it required building attachments necessary and capable of holding this kind of weight so what we chose to use were two matching brake rotors off the front end of a car they are identical and we used one for each N and we drilled them with a three bolt pattern so that they are interchangeable so here we have the first one on and Calvin is going to wrestle this 300 pound block over to put the second rotor on the other end so these are just put on we kind of measure for Center so they aren't exactly around but these blocks aren't necessarily symmetrical so there's no way to get them exactly around the lazing process is actually what's going to do that for us so in order to get these up on the lathe we put them into a sling and tie the sling around the center of the block so we have something to grab ahold to now by this lathe there's a there's an overhead hoist and we've got to come along it on it that we can grab ahold and pick these blocks up delay that this is being done on is a old South Bend lathe that's it has an 8 foot bed it's called a gap bed lathe and the one directly behind Calvin is a 1940's vintage of an old handy lathe both of the middle lays so you can see the little pole up on top that we're gonna hoist the block up using this little hoist attachment here and it swivels so we can swing this over delays and and get it attached to the to the Chuck so as we swing this over the rotor on the one end is going to attach to the Chuck on the head of the lathe it'll actually power the turning and then the rotor on this end we will attach to this tail stock with a bullnose attachment that will go into the tail stock and into the hole of the rotor thereby centering this block up so it's turnable it was a come-along here we can drop it down into position to where we can actually get the center into it and that's what's actually going to carry the weight of this block as we start turning so we'll take the sling off and you notice since it's in an octagon shape the outside corners are the widest part of these blocks and these happen to be a little too wide and they interfere with ways on the lathe tighten up Chuck there so we just take a an electric hand plane and we're gonna knock these corners off until they all clear the lathe [Music] then you see the corners getting knocked off just knock them off one by one until it all clears now you can see that we've got a twiddle rotate now because these aren't exactly round and because they are so heavy you'll notice when he turns on the lathe it stands off to one side in case something might come apart on these we didn't have anything happen on any of them but there's a lot of weight swinging there and especially when it's not completely imbalanced but this is a heavy lathe and it hands these blocks really well so to start turning these instead of using hand chisels and hand gagas using the boring bar and we're gonna do the outside edge now the travel on on this carry is about five inches so we do increments of five inches what we ended up doing we'll take this initial step down to about 17 inches in diameter so it's a fairly lengthy process to get these down into around configuration and we start to see the the end is down in in to around and we'll take this down until we get to about that 17 and into the ends on these bugs are going to be 13 to 15 so we're still over sized too but the whole purpose of turning these was to get rid of any excess wood so that these blocks can dry as much as possible so here we're gonna reach to about halfway of this hub like say these hubs or 24 inches long so if we can get to the halfway point then we'll eventually take this hub and we'll rotate it 180 degrees and do the same thing from the other end so here we have half of it into the round and what we need to do is to bore a hole through the center well in order to bore a hole through the center we have to remove the the disc brake the caliper the rotor there the rotary mean and the Center bullnose so we built this steady rest and it is has bearings on each of these three points that are heavy enough that can carry the weight here so we'll attach this steady rest to the carriage position it in place and this is why we're shooting for the 17 inches so here were bring the bearings up into place and these will actually carry the weight and hold the hub in the position that it's in right now so with a steady rest in place now we can back the the bull nose out and back up the the tail stock there and here we're going to use a two and a half inch bit to do our preliminary hole they take the the rotor off there and we can get six or seven inches of travel in this tail stock here maybe eight inches so we're gonna do the initial two and a half inch hole but our goal is to take these holes to about three and a half inches we want to open up as much air as we can expose as much surface area so we can help get some of the moisture out of these blocks to where they're actually usable for the wheels these hubs were about 40 percent moisture when they came here so there's a lot of moisture that needs to come out so now we'll take the boring bar that we use to do the outside turning and now we'll use it to open up the hole in the center I say we want to end up at about a three and a half inch hole when we're finished clear through since we didn't have a three and a half inch size bit which are difficult to come by anyway this boring bar we'll take it out and this will actually be the same process that the hubs will go through when we do the finish boring for the center were the boxing's the boxing is cast iron sleeve that the axles will actually run on things wheel to run on the axle so we get inside this is kind of a bi feel procedure and we can just go in as far as the initial hole was and now that it's opened up this will allow the two and a half inch bit to go in further and it'll go into the next step until we reach the halfway point inside so we go our our next six seven eight inches in there and go back and put the boring bar in the whole process of turning these hubs because of their size is it's just a step by step repetitive measure just piece by piece there's a lot of material that needs to get removed from these here we'll go back in again just kind of golden by feel and we'll take that inside two-and-a-half inch hole and open it up to the three and a half inch hole so we've got that board out and you can see the sawdust is kind of real spongy you can almost make snowballs sawdust balls out of it so with that half done and I'll put the sling back on it take the the weight off of the lathe and off of the the steady rest back off the carrying bearings and since the steady rest is attached to the Carrey's and we can just back up the carriage and the steady rest will come off so loosen up the chuck that has a hold of the rotor on the other end and we just take and rotate this 180 degrees and we'll just repeat the whole process now because these rotors came off the same car they're the same size they're drilled the same will we automatically keep our Center so we put the rotor back on the other side where where it came off and then the Chuck will then attach to that rotor take the steady rest off because now we need to put in bullnose back into the center and this is what we'll put the block right back to center where it was when you turn the first half off you'll apply our pressure to where we've got it pretty well he'll take off our sling and just start the process over again this whole procedure takes about when we first started it took us about six hours by the time you know you do a number of them you kind of get a little more efficient this was about ended up being about a four-hour process to get these into round on the outside to get them stepped down towards the steady rescued hole and to fold them and then to bore out the center hole it was kind of a time-consuming process here we're going to do the same thing it's off the outside we'll take the end down again to the 17 inches reach go down to the center where it would be a complete grilling block you see some hubs here that have already been turned we have 18 to do the total this one here is maybe 12 or the 13th one that we turned down here we see that we've reached to the center from the other direction well the whole hub now is into round few of these blocks had not sinned and this was a pretty minor one several of them had significant knots in them but they were still good soluble solids workable hugs so here we'll put our steady rest back in again take off the rotor put in the two-and-a-half inch bit and do this all again and when Calvin turns this lathe on you'll notice that the center hole that is in the hub is not exactly in the center but it doesn't really matter this when this two and a half inch bit goes in that hole will be right in the center where it needs to be some of those little holes that they initially were drilled with were off quite a bit that really didn't matter by the time we put them on the lathe everything came up round we're right where they needed to be so here we're gonna take the two and a half we're gonna open it up to the three and a half you say just kind of finishing the same process at the other end did just a time-consuming procedure so now this is where we initially took all 18 hub blocks down to kind of the this style this configuration and then they sat for almost close to a year just drying out out of the 18 we picked eight of the best that we thought were the best blocks that could actually be used for the for the big main wagons the other ten blocks Bobbie came up and hauled them back down to Bishop down in the Mojave Desert where they sat all last summer it's a hundred and twenty hundred thirty whatever they get down there to dry out and we left these eight here you can see the amount of sawdust that was generated off of this hub they they lose about thirty pounds worth of material when they were taken down to this shape then we stuck them on a pallet and they just said and like I said dried for about the next year so this is kind of the procedure that they went through initially taking them down to round and what we do from here will include on the next video these are due to be drawing now we'll let them set and then we'll take them to size and actually start cutting the mortises in for the spokes goal thanks for watching

Channel: EngelsCoachShop

Views: 139,150

Rating: 4.9548354 out of 5

Keywords: 20 mule team Borax, Bobby Tanner, Wheelwright, wagons, Borax wagons, large wood lathe, wagon wheels, horse drawn wagon, engles coach, engels coach, how to make a wagon, how to make wheels, carriage driving, horse drawn, Borax

Id: Gq41lsw_GLY

Length: 18min 34sec (1114 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 08 2016