Heated the tyre up to 700c and the rim burst into flames!

Love this! I did a green woodworking course with No1 son recently and really enjoyed it.

Blanks for the shafts. Have finished a couple of support outriggers, of which one can be seen.

Is it a Ye Olde Zaskarrr?

Trying to maximise size of shaft out of a given blank. Scaled this up to a template and have marked out the outline. Marked up blanks waiting to go through bandsaw - hopefully next week.

Example of shafts. We are removing the hardware from these shafts (which are too small for a shire horse). One shire horse is located within the shafts, and a further three will lead in line.

You're probably already familiar with a book called "The Wheelwright's Shop" by George Sturt? Worth a look if not. It's all about this stuff..

Not familiar with that book, but saw a copy on ebay so have bought it and look forward to reading it.

In our rebuild, we used the remains of the original wheels as a guide and pretty much made it up as we went along - reinventing the wheel as the saying goes. The wheels were undoubtedly the most trying part of the rebuild. All four are now finished - the second two being so much easier than the first two, having gained experience and put the cursing and swearing behind us.

Photos of log wagons indicate that the designs were very varied. Again we used the remains of the old wagon, and a bit of intuition as a guide for how we think this particular wagon looked. Most of the iron work has survived, and this usefully constrains the look of much of the rebuild.

We had hoped to have finished it by now, but current restrictions limit what we can do. Plan to finish by next summer now, rebuilding on a very adhoc basis.

Another task is to see if we can get any shire horse owners on board this project.

Be warned though that that book is more of a literary requiem to a vanishing world of work, rather than an A-Z wain-building manual.

Front wheels attached. No need for aligning tyre and wheel logos! Spokes kept snapping when we tried a 3 cross spoke pattern!

Shaped the component parts for the shafts, just need to mortice and tenon it all together.