That time a farmer's wagon wheel taught me a lesson about geometry

I was at a ren faire about 3 months ago, not even working, just walking around with my wife. We passed this tent where a guy was re-tiring a wooden wagon wheel the old school way, hammering a hot iron band onto the spokes. I watched him for maybe 10 minutes, and he was struggling REAL bad to get the band to sit even on the rim. He kept having to stop and re-heat it, and you could see the steel was starting to warp from the extra hammering. I finally walked over and asked if he'd checked his anvil face for level, and he looked at me like I had two heads. Turns out his anvil was sitting on a dirt patch that had settled a full 1/4 inch low on one side, throwing off every single strike he made. We leveled it up with some scrap wood shims, and his second attempt went on perfect in one heat. Has anyone else ever found a stupid simple fix like that that saved a whole project from being a nightmare?

3 comments

3 Comments

michaeld4825d ago

Man oh man. I used to think tools and setups didn't matter that much. Just muscle through it, right? But I had a similar thing with a circular saw blade. Kept burning the wood and binding up for like two hours. Finally checked the arbor nut. It was barely hand tight from the factory. Tightened it down proper and it cut like butter after that. Sometimes the dumb simple stuff is the whole problem.

william_harris25d ago

I had a circular saw for fifteen years with a wobble in the blade and never once checked the nut, just figured it was a cheap saw and kept cutting. If you can't tell the blade is loose by the sound or the feel after a few cuts, maybe the real problem is just lack of experience.

gracec1625d ago

Honestly, a quarter inch low on an anvil? That's wild. Ngl, I would've never thought to check the ground under the anvil, I'd just assume the anvil itself was off or the wheel was bad. Tbh that's the kind of thing where you could beat on that wheel for hours and just assume you're bad at it, not that your whole setup is crooked. It's crazy how something so small can mess up everything that relies on it, like a bad USB port making you think a whole drive is dead.