Final Stages

Finishing

We are approaching the final leg of renovating the wagon. While I've been cutting and preparing the planks for the doors Ollie and Andy have been at work making, painting and installing the washer-plates that go on the backs of the planks.
Those are the four hinges for the side doors lying in the middle between the two piles of planks.

The tops of the sides and ends are finished off with steel strips to protect the timber. We cut and drilled them to receive the hold down screws and, in the side walls, for the coach bolts that run from top to bottom of the planks and through the side members attached to the sole-bars.

There's not much left to do. All of those nuts on the outside of the wagon holding the planks on and the corner plates are to be replaced with correct size nuts as if they were Whitworth threads.

Unfortunately Whitworth coach-bolts were prohibitively expensive. I'd love to have used them to be true to the wagon's origins. Maybe in future renovations we'll be able to use Whitworth bolts, but that will mean either paying a lot of money for them or making them ourselves, which would take a long time.

Ollie already has wagons lined up for renovation, including a BR Standard brake van, a Toad and two five plank wagons which are steel frames in need of a lot of work, but at more than 100 years old each is a historical vehicle.