Breaking Down the Gear

This is where record keeping REALLY becomes important. There are buckets of bolts, screws and small parts on the gear that have to go right back in the exact position they came apart...front, back, right left.  Usually the maker had a marking system consisting of punches in the steel, but that is mostly on major components, not the little bits.

Now the REAL reason for this blog comes out...it's my record keeping system!  I will use it to document every move I make now, so some of it will get boring (I know, MOST of it is boring...)

It's time to begin breaking the gear down into its major components; axles, springs, spring bar.  EVERYTHING will be dismantled.

The Front Axle 

The first thing to do is clamp the ends of the spring leaves together where they meet at the front axle, so things don't go SPROING when bolts are undone!

In order to separate the front axle from the rest of the gear, I first had to release the spring bar, the top tier of the front axle assembly, from the springs.

The "clip"shown bolts through the end of the spring, so these clips are undone first.

Next off is the "king bolt"upon which the axle pivots. The bolt has a "tee" head. It passes through the spring bar, the 5th wheel assembly,the axle, and the ends of the springs (Y shaped assembly at top of photo).

Out with it.

Next is this piece of hardware. It's bolted to the front of the spring bar, passes in FRONT of the axle, then joins the ends of the springs

The bottom nut is removed, while the rest of the piece remains attached to the spring bar for now.

The spring bar is lifted off the axle, and the front axle is removed and set aside for now.








Unfortunately, close examination determined that the two king bolts are too worn to reuse. I have an album of close-ups of these bolts on Photobucket, if you care to see what a "too worn out bolt" looks like.  I will take the axle assembly to a blacksmith and ask him to reproduce the worn parts.

A wise person also pointed out to me that embrittlement - which has already reared its ugly head in this restoration - might be more of a safety risk than simple wear.

The disassembly of the relatively complex front axle will have to wait for new parts. Not like there aren't other things to do!








The Rear Axle

 Dismounting the rear axle wasn't nearly as complicated, but also produced a hardware failure...

The threaded stud on one side of this "saddle clip" twisted off when I tried unscrewing the nut.  The sheared ends show some rust, so I think it had a flaw in it originally.  This "saddle clip" holds one of the springs to the axle!






Total Commitment...

Several wise and wonderful people responded to my request for opinions on how best to deal with the worn king bolts and the final decision is to have them restored or replicated by a skilled blacksmith.

The clip with the broken thread will also go to the blacksmith, because this "saddle clip", a wider version of the axle clip, does not seem to be available new.

No more messing around...this is it. The entire running gear, less axles.  The bottom of the picture is the front of the gear.

While the springs measured the exact same distance from the center bolt to the floor, yes, it's true, you can see that the right side spring (the one on the left of the picture) has lost some of its arch.  I'll talk about that in another post.

Labels, labels and more labels.  Until I actually begin stripping parts and marking them permanently, everything is tagged.

For those of you new to antique carriages, you need to know that the axle nut, the nut that holds the wheel on, ALWAYS tightens when the carriage rolls forward, and LOOSENS when the carriage is pushed backward.  For that reason, the nuts on the left side of the axle screw on counter clockwise.  So even though the axle looks the same from end to end, you do NOT want to put it back on backwards!

I have a wagon I bought at auction, that had had its axle stubs replaced.  The front axle was actually re-installed BACKWARD! I fought the right hand nut for an hour trying to get it to break free so I could take the wheel off.  Finally, in exasperation, I thought, "Oh no..."  I turned the wrench clockwise and the nut came right off...  Yes, the axle was entirely dismantled and put back together correctly.

Anyway, the age of digital cameras and blogging makes it easy to photo-document EVERY detail and record one's experiences as they occur.  This has proven invaluable to me when I go looking for information from a previous project, and is also critical to putting everything back the way it was.

Anyway, here, I'm preparing to disassemble the left spring, which is the only way to get it loose from the right spring!

When disassembling springs, one needs to first clamp the leaves together. Otherwise, you'll be in for a big surprise.

SPROING!!!  You don't want this to occur suddenly when the nut falls off the central bolt!

By the way, a fact that is little known to science is that eyeballs are magnetized.  Yep!  It's true!  Crank a wrench on a rusty old nut and the rust will FLY OUT and attach itself to your cornea!

This is a job for safety glasses and gloves, because nothing will peel your knuckles faster than a slip of the wrench that sends your hand flying across a sharp surface.  Every leaf is tagged with critical positioning information.

These are the cross-bars that support the body bolsters, and tie the springs together.  Layered under the main spring leaf. Below that, the "reach" leaves (for lack of a better description).  These leaves are bent in the most fanciful manner.  The designer was either a genius, or a nut.

As a final note to this post, here is an amusing (?) detail. This spring clip holds the step to the bottom of the spring.  That's what the weird looking contraption is, a step.

If you look closely, you will see that the nut on the right hand side is larger than the nut on the left hand side...

There it is again!!

There are two of these clips for each spring.  On the right hand side of the carriage, both clips each have a 3/8" stud and a 5/16" stud.  They are reversed in position, one having the large stud on the outside of the spring, and one having the large stud on the inside of the spring.

Why?  Perhaps the threads were stripped at one point and were re-threaded to accept a smaller nut.  Just an illustration of WHY a restorer needs to take every care to keep track of their nuts!  :o)