Re: Radio Flyer Wagon
I have had quite a few of those in my short lifetime. My first one was one of those wooden stake side ones. The thing was, we lived out in the country, with an array of animals, and the ones we didn't have, the neighbors (if you could call them that - 3/4 mile hike through the woods to get to them) did.
Therefore, due to being where we lived, and what I did back then, it was more of a cargo wagon, than anything else. 100 pounds of corn (no joke) 1/2 mile up the hill from the garden, to rocks needed to build the rock wall along a portion of the driveway. We were building a house on the other side of the property, so dad would load his tools in it, and I would haul them to the house etc etc. That wagon hauled everything for a few years.
Then, when it wore out, we replaced it with one of the larger, deeper bodied metal ones that had the larger pneumatic tires. I have since gone through three of those.
Recently, my scout troop attended a campout, with a wild west theme, where we had to build a chuckwagon, and race other troops. I took the tools to the meeting in a wagon bed (after we killed them, that is what we used them for) with the plans to build a completely different style chuckwagon. The rest of the patrol liked the wagon, so we decided to use the wagon bed. I had to do some other things that night, so I left them the tools and materials for part of the meeting, and when I came back, they had a 2 x 4 frame underneath and the wheels attached to that, as they kept pulling through the bottom of the bed, where they were originally attached. It is kinda sloppy, as I wasn't there (I am a perfectionist) but structurally solid. It has plywood in the bottom, as the bed had plenty of tears in it, where the axle was bolted to, before they pulled through. I had to fabricate some of the mounts for the wheels out of 1/2 inch steel tubing, as the old ones had been damaged in the wagons overuse.
BTW, ours won
After the trip, I took it home, and removed the cover, and cosmetic pieces, and we have a functioning wagon again. In the past 3 weeks, it has already carried 2 cords of firewood rounds, 140 gallons of recycled water, and currently has our newest outboard on top of a pallet, on it.
Since we have 2 more beds, and sets of wheels, we will definitely make at least one more, replacing the sloppy wood frame with square tubing. We are thinking about making a really off road welding cart with one of the sets of wheels.
Yeah, I guess you can say I have used one of those before.
