Covered Wagon

I know everyone has already seen this, but I wasn't able to upload pictures of it earlier, so now that it is working, I thought I'd put the pictures on my blog for a journal entry.

 

Samuel's teacher gave all the 4th graders and assignment over Christmas break. They've been learning about Oregon and the Oregon trail, so she asked each kid to make a covered wagon with their families and have it done by January 17th. She really left this open. She said it could be made out of anything they wanted, and it could be any size. The only size restriction she gave was that it had to fit inside the school doors. Aaron and Samuel had a lot of fun with this project. Aaron took the week off of Christmas and they spent it all in the shop. Luckily we had a broken down wagon just two houses down that they were able to run over and take measurements off of. This is about a 1/4 scale of an real prairie schooner. The bed is 1'x3' and probably stands about 2.5' high. The back wheels are 12.5" and the front ones are 9" in diameter. We tried to make it the approximate size of the little Red Ryder wagon that we all grew up with. Aaron tried to make as much of it as possible out of wood. At the last minute and after a lot of failures, Aaron was even able to come up with a way of bending the wooden bows!! He did have to use a few screws, one large bolt for part of the turning mechanism and then metal bolts and washers for the hubs. Aaron experimented with putting metal rims over the wheels, but we ran out of time before he had it down.

We are hoping that this wagon will last over the years and we can just add accessories each time this project comes along.