What the Winter Brings

Waiting for the weather to improve.
In the meantime I've been working on the interior of the wagon. I just have to make sure I don't attach anything that will be taller than garage door height. As you can see, I've added the interior walls, and built in some cabinets, a sink, the benches and the sleeping area. When everything else is finished (after the wagon has moved outside and has a top) I'll add some nicer flooring.

End Walls

This is the window end wall, fully assembled with shutter tracks, shutters, and carved headboard. I am starting to primer it in the photo. Because my garage is not tall enough to fully assemble the wagon and then be able to get it out, I am having to assemble the end walls as seperate units and then attach them after the wagon is out of the garage.
They probably weigh in at well over 300 lbs and have been on and off the wagon more times than I really like to think about. I suppose that I could have used thinner wood for the beadboard but I wanted it to really hold up well to the wind hitting it at highway speed, so it's way overbuilt.

Learning Curve Note:
I used a jigsaw to cut out the shape of the end walls. Because of the curve and the thickness of the wood there was a lot of deviation in the vertical tracking of the blade. Because of this there will be a lot of fairing compound between the bows and the end wall to even it out. I should have used a plunge router mounted on a beam compass instead.

Bending the Bows : Part III

After soaking the wood for the bows for two weeks I drained the soaking tube and poured in about five gallons of boiling water. Then after agitating the wood to make sure it all got hit with the hot water I pulled out one of the pieces, laid it on the ground, and poured another three gallons of boiling water over it, turning it over, and working up and down its entire length.

Then moving quickly I took it over to my turning stanchions and bent it around, clamping as I went. Thanks to my lovely clamp girl, pictured above, for her assistance. I repeated this procedure with each of the pieces.

I let the bent bows stay on the stanchions for two weeks, covering them up at night to avoid the dew and fog. When I unclamped them they stayed pretty true to shape, but I tied the ends together to hold them in their curve until I was ready to use them on the wagon.



Learning Curve Note: I used thin PVC and it didn't hold up well to the boiling water. By the time I had done the last batch of bows it was severely deformed and had assumed a C-shape and an elliptical cross section. I would probably use the heavy, black, schedule-40 sewer pipe. It would be less effected by the boiling water. I would also use a larger diameter, that way I could soak more pieces at a time.

Bending the Bows: Part II

The picture above shows the stanchions set in place and waiting for the wood to be bent around them. They are mounted on a pattern board made from two 4' x 8' sheets of plywood upon which a cross section of the wagon is drawn. I then screwed down the stanchions following the curve drawn upon the pattern board.

Learning Curve Note: When I assembled the stanchions I just eyeballed the angle. Prior to bending the boards I had a conversation with Ash and Jeff, two fellow wagon builders, they said that it turned out to be very important that the stanchions be at a true right angle. After I bent my first set of bows I also found this to be true. As you stack the bows up the stanchions any deviation from the vertical becomes very noticeable and harder to deal with the higher you go.
So, make sure they are built at an exact 90 degree angle.

Continued in part III.

Bending the Bows Part I

The long white object laying along the sidewalk in the above photo is my soaking container. It is composed of two 10 foot lengths of 6" diameter PVC drain pipe joined in the middle and closed with a fixed cap at one end and a removable threaded plug at the other. It is filled with water, and four 16' x 2" x 3/8" lengths of Douglas Fir that are destined to be some of the bows for the wagon roof.
One way to bend the bows is to steam them for about an hour and then bend them around your stanchions. The other is soaking them and then bending. Since I didn't have a twenty foot long steam box or the propane tank, burner, and container to make the steam and didn't want the added expense of purchasing all those things, I decided on soaking.
I figured two weeks was a good round soaking time, so I put in some water and wood and let it sit. I rolled it back and forth once a day just to agitate the wood and make sure it was evenly wet.

Learning Curve Note: I soaked the wood in batches, it would have been easier and less time consuming to use larger diameter PVC and soak all the wood at once. Also I experienced some algae growth on two of the boards in the first batch, after that I added about a 1/4 cup of bleach to the soaking water and did not have any further problems.

Continued in next post.

18 Inches of Quality

The first 18 inches are done, five and a half feet to go. Well not quite completely done. I have to paint over the bolt heads, cut some more notches in the upper bench, and cover the whole thing with several coats of polyurethane varnish. Also I need to cap the interior bolts and put the last six inches of the interior sheeting over the gap at the ends once I bolt the end walls on. But other than that, the sides are finished.

The Complexity of Torsion Boxes

This is a view of the test fitting of the side walls showing the construction detail of the torsion boxes. The instructors in the course were very much in favor of torsion boxes. Basically they are a ladder-like framework sandwiched between plywood sheets. The image shows the framework and outer sheet before the inner sheet is attached. The grey objects are steel brackets that will stabilize the walls and anchor them to the wagon bed.

In a traditionally built wagon the walls would have been constructed of one or two large (12") wooden planks, edge joined, and then anchored in the same way, with a series of large C-shaped brackets.

After using the torsion box method which involved having to square up and align, many, many parts, and repeated test fittings and removals from the wagon chassis, I would opt for the traditional method, cut your wood to size and attach it. Ever so much simpler