Bring on the Junk Wagon

Every farm needs one: a junk trailer that you'd never run on a road, made from the bed of some long-lost pickup truck.

 I wish I had the vintage truck that gave birth to our trailer. From debris, including a completely rusted-out tailgate in the woods, I am guessing it was a 1950s International Harvester truck. The trailer lived part of its life in Buckingham County, where my late father-in-law took it to haul brush away as he cleared out around his old family "Home Place" we restored between 2001 and 2012. Those brush piles dwarfed the ones I made this weekend, cleaning up our garden. This year's pile? The size of an 8' x 10' shed.

 Puny by country standards. It will breed rabbits and keep the predators happy.

The old trailer finally gave up the ghost, or at least the Eisenhower-era air in the rock-hard tires. So I didn't use it for a while, as I hunted down ways to update the thing. I had modern rims from an old Buick I'm restoring. The problem? The original trailer had four wheel-lugs. Anything modern has five or more.

With some research, asking my brother-in-law, and YouTube videos, I found out how easy it can be to add a new hub to an old axle. Without getting too deep into the weeds, soon I'd mounted a new hub and the 15" hot-rod rims from the Buick.  

 I went to our local tire dealer, who always gets paid by me in cash (plus a fifth of his favorite bourbon at Christmas) to see if he had an old tires that were not road-worthy but in good shape. For the price of mounting them, I got two snow tires to put on the wagon. I had to cut off the flapping antique fenders but that was a small price to pay.

To make the hitch work with our UTV or farm tractors, I went to Tractor Supply and found a 1 5/8" trailer hitch and ball. With a drill applied to the shaft from trailer, I had it in place with two stout bolts. I cannot tell you how joyful it was to feel the trailer jolt as I pulled off in low gear, to get a bunch of cut grass that would soon be wind-rowed, dried, and stacked for next year's hay in a sunny place. 

"Make do or do without," my wife's dad said many times. He learned that in the Depression. He also said the farmer's mantra "I might have a use for that!'

We tossed the old tires and rims into our erosion-control area and buried them. The old fenders went to the transfer station's metal bin. The rest of the tractor? Working hard many days of the week. 

 

If you farm, look for (or better yet, build) an old pickup-bed trailer. Town garden? Hunt the estate sales for a utility wagon. I saw one with a dump bed today at an estate sale. Just needed wheels and tires.